5 ms·

It Doesn't Have To Be All Or Nothing With A Startup

77 points by comatose_kid 18y ago

swombat 18y ago
Basecamp was created with 10 hours/week of programming time and as a 3rd or 4th project alongside paying customers for the designers over the course of about 6 months. In other words, we didn’t drop everything we had to create Basecamp, and you don’t have to either. I'm not sure how accessible this advice is to those whose name isn't David and who don't have a tendency to say "woops!" when explaining stuff. (ie to the non-DHH's amongst us, which I imagine is the majority) Here's a qualificative for the article: If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.
- davidw 18y ago
  I think that, difficult as it may be, looking at statistics is the only way to really answer this one. One DHH anecdote only says that it's possible to do what he did, but says nothing about the likelihood that other people may be able to repeat his success.
  - Tamerlin 18y ago
    Most software projects use the sweatshop method. (We're late, throw more people and more hours at it.) And most software projects fail. Although that isn't any more definitive than anything else, it does give DHH's view some weight, and so far my experience in the industry backs it up.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      The Feedburner guys were a consultancy --- BurningDoor --- since 1995. Nineteen Ninety Five. Our ISP used to host them. They had awesome offices. You know what? I'll take Dick Costello's experience over the idealized YC moonshot business plan any day of the week. Come to think of it: BurningDoor, 37Signals; maybe this is just a Chicago thing.
      - pchristensen 18y ago
        Don't forget Adrian Holovaty (Django, Everyblock) and Aza Raskin (Humanized, Mozilla Labs). Also from Chicago.
        tptacek 18y ago
        Everyblock took funding and Humanized seems to have folded, but I'm happy to recognize more hometown heroes. =)
        pchristensen 18y ago
        EveryBlock's funding was from a journalism grant, and rather than have some of the destructive conditions that VC money has, it had a condition that the code they produce must be publicly available at the end of the grant. While I'm name dropping, Threadless is another Chicago company.
    - davidw 18y ago
      We weren't talking about most software projects though, we were talking about most startups. At least I was, and so was the original article.
      - Tamerlin 18y ago
        I was also. I've worked for several startups, and indeed their first mistake was to develop software in crunch mode, and their second was to throw more people at it because it was late. In every case, the result was software that required a huge amount of effort to do anything with (about as agile as a 16-wheeler with no gas in the tank and 12 flat tires), morale that tailed off as the burnout increased, and failure. Most of those companies WILL fail, because their product will be poor, even if it's a good idea. Revolution health is a good example; they started out with a good idea and executed badly... now they're going through rounds of layoffs, making very little money, and Google is accomplishing what they've failed to (e.g. online health records).
- tptacek 18y ago
  I don't accept your argument, but even if I did, the article still has merit. The opposing philosophy is, "drop everything else and go full speed ahead on your product". Ok, do that. Your likely outcome is still bad. We talk ad nauseum about the successes in our field, but fool ourselves about the failures. The failure model isn't Kiko. It's the 1,000 PHP apps that we've never heard of, because they didn't get off the ground after they used up the runway they got from their founders 3 month sprint. No matter what you do, the odds are very much against: * You making enough money with a web app after a 3-month sprint to eat. * You closing a round of funding of any sort. On the flip side, if you do your product "part time", the odds are very good you'll still be nurturing your product 3 months from now, or 6 months, or two years. The "lack of focus" hurts your chances, but the sustainability helps your chances. Also, let's just be clear about something: DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Find another excuse not to take a swing. =)
  - davidw 18y ago
    You make some good points, but I think this debate has been run round and round enough that I just want to see more data. > DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Rails was perhaps not quite as technically hard as other things, but in terms of putting together the right technology at the right time, it was brilliantly successful, far more than most products anyone here will release. So in terms of shining some light on basecamp, Rails was far more successful than doing something technically great, but obscure.
  - tonystubblebine 18y ago
    As a programmer I couldn't clear the Rails 1.0 bar technically, let alone come up with the insights DHH did to make it so usable. But the good news for other people is that didn't stop me from getting my company to break-even after only six months of part time work. Definitely the team over at 37signals (don't forget Jason) are very good and would have been successful in almost any situation. I think the key point that they make though, is that their success comes more from their decision to play to their strengths and be pragmatic, rather than their talent.
- edw519 18y ago
  "If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time." Don't make the mistake of underestimating yourself. I'm not suggesting that you'll go out and write Rails in 3 weekends. What I am suggesting is that the more I meet "famous" hackers and the more I meet people from this community (online and offline), the more I realize that there's not really all that much that separates us. Lot's of people here are (obviously) brilliant. And even for those who are a little less brilliant, brilliance is only one part of the equation. Work habits, determination, perseverence, passion, and maybe most of all, belief, are just as important. Don't sell yourself short. I have no idea if I am as brilliant as DHH. Odds are against me. But he inspires me to achieve things just as cool as his. And I just know that I can. I suspect most people here can too.
- raghus 18y ago
  Would you say that most of what PG says also can be discounted by your logic? If you're capable of writing one of the first successful web/e-commerce sites and creating a new Lisp dialect and starting a new type of venture firm and writing popular essays, chances are....
  - swombat 18y ago
    As far as I can tell from his articles, PG was pretty focused on Viaweb when it was starting up - not working on it 10 hours a week while holding a full-time job. I'm attacking the idea that anyone can start a successful startup with 10 hours a week - not the idea that anyone can start a successful startup (although I'd say even there there's a bar, but it's much lower). DHH, in this article, presents a method that he suggest applies to anybody. I'm just saying it doesn't apply to anybody.
    - sethg 18y ago
      He's not saying that anyone can start a successful startup in 10 hours per week. Quite the contrary: "Odds are you’ll fail. Just as odds are you’ll fail if you take millions of VC money, hire a staff of twenty, and spend 120 hours/week on it." The take-home point of the essay, ISTM, is that if you only have 10 hours a week for your startup, those 10 hours can still be well spent.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      A lot of things that applied to Graham in the mid-90s no longer apply. The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate. If you weren't working in 1996 (unless you graduated early, you were in high school, swombat) I'll say: do not underestimate how silly things were back then.
      - davidw 18y ago
        > The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate. The book "Growing a Business", written in the '80ies, about a gardening catalog company of all things, has a lot of the same lessons as "getting real", and to boot comes with its very own ISBN. Here's my summary of it (but go buy it, it's a good one): http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business
- bayareaguy 18y ago
  If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time. While I've never worked directly with Rails, working with Capistrano is making me use Ruby more and more and I'm starting to think the best qualities of Rails come from Ruby. Ruby seems to offer plenty of opportunity for an experienced developer to map their problem domain directly to language primitives. Once you get good at doing that you'll be surprised how more efficient you become and how much more time you have for things like creating a business.
mynameishere 18y ago
We’ve repeated this story so many times that it’s starting to wear a little thin +1
- menloparkbum 18y ago
  I apologize for capping on the disappearing salmon story. I'd rather read that than more 37signals marketing material.
edw519 18y ago
The more I read these 37signals articles, the more I like them. I realize that a lot of their philosophy runs counter to the already unconventional wisdom here, but so what. I also realize that we may soon hit 37signals saturation (much like techcrunch saturation) here, but again, so what. Many of us are in less than optimal situations (money, time, resources, collaborators, etc.), so this is some of the best advice you can get... "How about you turn your perceived weakenesses into strengths. Embrace your constraints..." Excellent! My own example: I am frustrated that I don't have enough time to spend writing my own code because I still have several consulting gigs. So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" That change in framing has really saved me a lot of time. Sometimes you just gotta change your view by asking a different question. A 37signals post has once again helped me to think outside the quadralateral. Thanks, DHH.
- johnyzee 18y ago
  > So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)
  - edw519 18y ago
    "Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)" That's not what I meant (although I suspect you said it in jest). It has nothing whatsoever to do with using anyone else's property (intellectual or otherwise). It has everything to do with what I learned from the gig. My most common example is so common and has so much common sense that it's easy to overlook. I call it the "suck test". Every time a client has me change something, I ask if it's because their business has changed since this was written or if it was just written poorly. It's often the latter. Every time I look at something that someone else wrote and say, "Who wrote this &#^$%? It sucks," I add it to my suck list and make sure I never do that. This one thing has saved me thousands of hours. Stuff I never would have imagined unless I had seen it somewhere else. And there are a lot of other examples, too. I think that this is what DHH meant when he talked about turning "perceived weakenesses into strengths".
vaksel 18y ago
I think the problem with such an approach is its easy to lose your motivation. So you put off working a day here, a day there, and then 5 years later you are still in development. At least when you go all in, you get that extra drive to get your project in gear. And yes the failure/success rate is not talked about, but I would venture a guess that the guys who work on their start ups full time, have a higher success rate(even if its only a few %) than the guys who do it part time between work, going to home depot, and tending to their garden
- tptacek 18y ago
  A "guess" is all that is. If you want to be successful, build something people will love, and then charge money for it. The market does not care how crappy your garden looks. The fields are littered with the corpses of full-time startups. The world is going to try to kill you in a thousand different ways that you can't predict. Your product plan should focus on building something people will love. Your business plan should focus on keeping yourself alive to build that product. The two things are seperate.
  - t0pj 18y ago
    "The fields are littered with the corpses of full-time startups." Watch your step!
    - tptacek 18y ago
      I've stepped in a couple already.
  - davidw 18y ago
    > A "guess" is all that is. As is a huge bunch of startup advice purveyed via blogs, articles, books and so on. A lot of it seems to even conflict. Not that it's necessarily bad, just that after a while I get tired of it and wish that there were more data. I actually think that that's a cool aspect of YC that's perhaps overlooked at times: with all the startups going through there, he's getting the chance to look very closely at a lot of different companies and people.
lr 18y ago
This is what I am doing with http://timefo.com http://timefo.com . I have a day job, and I do Timefo at night and on weekends, and still have a life. I have hesitated to outright list it on HN as an "Ask HN" item, but let's just see what happens with this comment... My main concern is that I don't have a lot of time for support, so that is why I have not publicized it more widely.
- terpua 18y ago
  You should offer this tool as a visualization utility and allow for importing to Wordpress and Powerpoint. Timelines are usually manually intensive to make "pretty" and automating that would be nice.
- t0pj 18y ago
  So where Facebook wants to own the social map, you're well on your way to owning the social timepiece; excellent.
  - lr 18y ago
    Thanks for the vote of confidence!
- davidw 18y ago
  Definitely post it in its own thread if you're looking for feedback! What is more a part of this site than people doing that? It's much more productive than reading 37signals say the same thing a new way. Here's some comments: - The take a tour image is pixelated and ugly. - It needs something more compelling, IMO, as a reason to use it. It is a neat widget, but nothing I'd think of using. Maybe there are some cool use cases that would get people excited about it. - After just a quick glance, it feels like something that might be good as part of something else. - Clicking and dragging on a timeline (the blog one, for example) is hard because there is too much 'link space' (even where there are no words) as opposed to 'drag space', if that makes sense.
  - lr 18y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! The images are pretty bad, so I will try to do better ones this weekend. As you and terpua wrote, it would be more useful if one could use it on a blog for visualization of entries, etc., and that is something I want to work on in the near future. I will post it as an "Ask HN" item soon.
lux 18y ago
What a great quote: "If lost opportunity is a risk when you try, it’s a guarantee if you don’t." Nice!
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
maxklein 18y ago
Finally, this guy makes some sense.
sabat 18y ago
For once I heartily agree with DHH. It does not need to be all-or-nothing. Full stop.

77 points by comatose_kid 18y ago

Basecamp was created with 10 hours/week of programming time and as a 3rd or 4th project alongside paying customers for the designers over the course of about 6 months. In other words, we didn’t drop everything we had to create Basecamp, and you don’t have to either. I'm not sure how accessible this advice is to those whose name isn't David and who don't have a tendency to say "woops!" when explaining stuff. (ie to the non-DHH's amongst us, which I imagine is the majority) Here's a qualificative for the article: If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.

davidw 18y ago
I think that, difficult as it may be, looking at statistics is the only way to really answer this one. One DHH anecdote only says that it's possible to do what he did, but says nothing about the likelihood that other people may be able to repeat his success.
- Tamerlin 18y ago
  Most software projects use the sweatshop method. (We're late, throw more people and more hours at it.) And most software projects fail. Although that isn't any more definitive than anything else, it does give DHH's view some weight, and so far my experience in the industry backs it up.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    The Feedburner guys were a consultancy --- BurningDoor --- since 1995. Nineteen Ninety Five. Our ISP used to host them. They had awesome offices. You know what? I'll take Dick Costello's experience over the idealized YC moonshot business plan any day of the week. Come to think of it: BurningDoor, 37Signals; maybe this is just a Chicago thing.
    - pchristensen 18y ago
      Don't forget Adrian Holovaty (Django, Everyblock) and Aza Raskin (Humanized, Mozilla Labs). Also from Chicago.
      - tptacek 18y ago
        Everyblock took funding and Humanized seems to have folded, but I'm happy to recognize more hometown heroes. =)
        pchristensen 18y ago
        EveryBlock's funding was from a journalism grant, and rather than have some of the destructive conditions that VC money has, it had a condition that the code they produce must be publicly available at the end of the grant. While I'm name dropping, Threadless is another Chicago company.
  - davidw 18y ago
    We weren't talking about most software projects though, we were talking about most startups. At least I was, and so was the original article.
    - Tamerlin 18y ago
      I was also. I've worked for several startups, and indeed their first mistake was to develop software in crunch mode, and their second was to throw more people at it because it was late. In every case, the result was software that required a huge amount of effort to do anything with (about as agile as a 16-wheeler with no gas in the tank and 12 flat tires), morale that tailed off as the burnout increased, and failure. Most of those companies WILL fail, because their product will be poor, even if it's a good idea. Revolution health is a good example; they started out with a good idea and executed badly... now they're going through rounds of layoffs, making very little money, and Google is accomplishing what they've failed to (e.g. online health records).
tptacek 18y ago
I don't accept your argument, but even if I did, the article still has merit. The opposing philosophy is, "drop everything else and go full speed ahead on your product". Ok, do that. Your likely outcome is still bad. We talk ad nauseum about the successes in our field, but fool ourselves about the failures. The failure model isn't Kiko. It's the 1,000 PHP apps that we've never heard of, because they didn't get off the ground after they used up the runway they got from their founders 3 month sprint. No matter what you do, the odds are very much against: * You making enough money with a web app after a 3-month sprint to eat. * You closing a round of funding of any sort. On the flip side, if you do your product "part time", the odds are very good you'll still be nurturing your product 3 months from now, or 6 months, or two years. The "lack of focus" hurts your chances, but the sustainability helps your chances. Also, let's just be clear about something: DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Find another excuse not to take a swing. =)
- davidw 18y ago
  You make some good points, but I think this debate has been run round and round enough that I just want to see more data. > DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Rails was perhaps not quite as technically hard as other things, but in terms of putting together the right technology at the right time, it was brilliantly successful, far more than most products anyone here will release. So in terms of shining some light on basecamp, Rails was far more successful than doing something technically great, but obscure.
- tonystubblebine 18y ago
  As a programmer I couldn't clear the Rails 1.0 bar technically, let alone come up with the insights DHH did to make it so usable. But the good news for other people is that didn't stop me from getting my company to break-even after only six months of part time work. Definitely the team over at 37signals (don't forget Jason) are very good and would have been successful in almost any situation. I think the key point that they make though, is that their success comes more from their decision to play to their strengths and be pragmatic, rather than their talent.
edw519 18y ago
"If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time." Don't make the mistake of underestimating yourself. I'm not suggesting that you'll go out and write Rails in 3 weekends. What I am suggesting is that the more I meet "famous" hackers and the more I meet people from this community (online and offline), the more I realize that there's not really all that much that separates us. Lot's of people here are (obviously) brilliant. And even for those who are a little less brilliant, brilliance is only one part of the equation. Work habits, determination, perseverence, passion, and maybe most of all, belief, are just as important. Don't sell yourself short. I have no idea if I am as brilliant as DHH. Odds are against me. But he inspires me to achieve things just as cool as his. And I just know that I can. I suspect most people here can too.
raghus 18y ago
Would you say that most of what PG says also can be discounted by your logic? If you're capable of writing one of the first successful web/e-commerce sites and creating a new Lisp dialect and starting a new type of venture firm and writing popular essays, chances are....
- swombat 18y ago
  As far as I can tell from his articles, PG was pretty focused on Viaweb when it was starting up - not working on it 10 hours a week while holding a full-time job. I'm attacking the idea that anyone can start a successful startup with 10 hours a week - not the idea that anyone can start a successful startup (although I'd say even there there's a bar, but it's much lower). DHH, in this article, presents a method that he suggest applies to anybody. I'm just saying it doesn't apply to anybody.
  - sethg 18y ago
    He's not saying that anyone can start a successful startup in 10 hours per week. Quite the contrary: "Odds are you’ll fail. Just as odds are you’ll fail if you take millions of VC money, hire a staff of twenty, and spend 120 hours/week on it." The take-home point of the essay, ISTM, is that if you only have 10 hours a week for your startup, those 10 hours can still be well spent.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    A lot of things that applied to Graham in the mid-90s no longer apply. The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate. If you weren't working in 1996 (unless you graduated early, you were in high school, swombat) I'll say: do not underestimate how silly things were back then.
    - davidw 18y ago
      > The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate. The book "Growing a Business", written in the '80ies, about a gardening catalog company of all things, has a lot of the same lessons as "getting real", and to boot comes with its very own ISBN. Here's my summary of it (but go buy it, it's a good one): http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/4/growing-a-business
bayareaguy 18y ago
If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time. While I've never worked directly with Rails, working with Capistrano is making me use Ruby more and more and I'm starting to think the best qualities of Rails come from Ruby. Ruby seems to offer plenty of opportunity for an experienced developer to map their problem domain directly to language primitives. Once you get good at doing that you'll be surprised how more efficient you become and how much more time you have for things like creating a business.

mynameishere 18y ago

We’ve repeated this story so many times that it’s starting to wear a little thin +1

menloparkbum 18y ago
I apologize for capping on the disappearing salmon story. I'd rather read that than more 37signals marketing material.

edw519 18y ago

The more I read these 37signals articles, the more I like them. I realize that a lot of their philosophy runs counter to the already unconventional wisdom here, but so what. I also realize that we may soon hit 37signals saturation (much like techcrunch saturation) here, but again, so what. Many of us are in less than optimal situations (money, time, resources, collaborators, etc.), so this is some of the best advice you can get... "How about you turn your perceived weakenesses into strengths. Embrace your constraints..." Excellent! My own example: I am frustrated that I don't have enough time to spend writing my own code because I still have several consulting gigs. So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" That change in framing has really saved me a lot of time. Sometimes you just gotta change your view by asking a different question. A 37signals post has once again helped me to think outside the quadralateral. Thanks, DHH.

johnyzee 18y ago
> So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)
- edw519 18y ago
  "Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)" That's not what I meant (although I suspect you said it in jest). It has nothing whatsoever to do with using anyone else's property (intellectual or otherwise). It has everything to do with what I learned from the gig. My most common example is so common and has so much common sense that it's easy to overlook. I call it the "suck test". Every time a client has me change something, I ask if it's because their business has changed since this was written or if it was just written poorly. It's often the latter. Every time I look at something that someone else wrote and say, "Who wrote this &#^$%? It sucks," I add it to my suck list and make sure I never do that. This one thing has saved me thousands of hours. Stuff I never would have imagined unless I had seen it somewhere else. And there are a lot of other examples, too. I think that this is what DHH meant when he talked about turning "perceived weakenesses into strengths".

vaksel 18y ago

I think the problem with such an approach is its easy to lose your motivation. So you put off working a day here, a day there, and then 5 years later you are still in development. At least when you go all in, you get that extra drive to get your project in gear. And yes the failure/success rate is not talked about, but I would venture a guess that the guys who work on their start ups full time, have a higher success rate(even if its only a few %) than the guys who do it part time between work, going to home depot, and tending to their garden

tptacek 18y ago
A "guess" is all that is. If you want to be successful, build something people will love, and then charge money for it. The market does not care how crappy your garden looks. The fields are littered with the corpses of full-time startups. The world is going to try to kill you in a thousand different ways that you can't predict. Your product plan should focus on building something people will love. Your business plan should focus on keeping yourself alive to build that product. The two things are seperate.
- t0pj 18y ago
  "The fields are littered with the corpses of full-time startups." Watch your step!
  - tptacek 18y ago
    I've stepped in a couple already.
- davidw 18y ago
  > A "guess" is all that is. As is a huge bunch of startup advice purveyed via blogs, articles, books and so on. A lot of it seems to even conflict. Not that it's necessarily bad, just that after a while I get tired of it and wish that there were more data. I actually think that that's a cool aspect of YC that's perhaps overlooked at times: with all the startups going through there, he's getting the chance to look very closely at a lot of different companies and people.

lr 18y ago

This is what I am doing with http://timefo.com http://timefo.com . I have a day job, and I do Timefo at night and on weekends, and still have a life. I have hesitated to outright list it on HN as an "Ask HN" item, but let's just see what happens with this comment... My main concern is that I don't have a lot of time for support, so that is why I have not publicized it more widely.

terpua 18y ago
You should offer this tool as a visualization utility and allow for importing to Wordpress and Powerpoint. Timelines are usually manually intensive to make "pretty" and automating that would be nice.
t0pj 18y ago
So where Facebook wants to own the social map, you're well on your way to owning the social timepiece; excellent.
- lr 18y ago
  Thanks for the vote of confidence!
davidw 18y ago
Definitely post it in its own thread if you're looking for feedback! What is more a part of this site than people doing that? It's much more productive than reading 37signals say the same thing a new way. Here's some comments: - The take a tour image is pixelated and ugly. - It needs something more compelling, IMO, as a reason to use it. It is a neat widget, but nothing I'd think of using. Maybe there are some cool use cases that would get people excited about it. - After just a quick glance, it feels like something that might be good as part of something else. - Clicking and dragging on a timeline (the blog one, for example) is hard because there is too much 'link space' (even where there are no words) as opposed to 'drag space', if that makes sense.
- lr 18y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! The images are pretty bad, so I will try to do better ones this weekend. As you and terpua wrote, it would be more useful if one could use it on a blog for visualization of entries, etc., and that is something I want to work on in the near future. I will post it as an "Ask HN" item soon.

lux 18y ago

What a great quote: "If lost opportunity is a risk when you try, it’s a guarantee if you don’t." Nice!

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

maxklein 18y ago

Finally, this guy makes some sense.

sabat 18y ago

For once I heartily agree with DHH. It does not need to be all-or-nothing. Full stop.