"Why can't great hackers indulge in pointless experiments in scalability without suffering the ridicule of their peers?" There's nothing wrong with that, but y

"Why can't great hackers indulge in pointless experiments in scalability without suffering the ridicule of their peers?" There's nothing wrong with that, but you shouldn't do it with your startup. Optimization is inherently limiting -- your product will probably be completely different in three months, and you will most likely find yourself having to reverse or work-around unnecessary decisions that you made early on. I know we did, and now our engineers probably curse my name for it. It has probably cost us dozens of hours (and thousands of dollars). "Developers acting on their own accord must be allowed to be inspired by their hopes and dreams and not always take the straightest path to the goal." If your goal is to make awesomely scalable software and learn a lot, then, yeah. If your goal is to build a company, however, you should shed every non-essential and worry about potential problems when they're real problems.