Maybe it rubbed people the wrong way right after DHH's talk at Startup School. Six weeks ago, I got 3000 page views (mostly from Hacker News) and 24 karma for

Maybe it rubbed people the wrong way right after DHH's talk at Startup School. Six weeks ago, I got 3000 page views (mostly from Hacker News) and 24 karma for an article where I made the exact same assertion (37s isn't a startup), and not one person complained about the characterization: "Facebook is a startup - a huge and wildly successful one, but until they find their killer revenue model, they’re living off of investment money. 37signals is not a startup - they were profitable from web design consulting while they developed Basecamp, Rails, etc, and now their products fund their business without outside investment. Fog Creek was a startup (living off of Joel’s MSFT cash) until FogBugz took off, and now revenue from that product runs their business. Google is a business, but until they perfected AdWords and Adsense (2002? 2003?), they were like Facebook is now, a really big successful startup. YouTube went from startup to acquisition and never was a business." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130757 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130757 http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hacker-vs-engineer-know-the-difference/ http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hacker-vs-engineer...