Niel is currently working on his 3rd startup, two successful so far. I think he knows the early stage start ups pretty well. I know what you mean about getting

Niel is currently working on his 3rd startup, two successful so far. I think he knows the early stage start ups pretty well. I know what you mean about getting bogged down in writing everything down. I have had a hard time getting away from verbal communication and just working on my own as well. I can recall various times it has led to problems and spending time on the wrong things though. I think he basically pushes to be fast but still have some documentation, because the few missteps you make, will waste more time than you think you are saving. Everyone should be able to QA, but manually QAing or forgetting to QA something because it was a weird edge case can really hurt or slow you down. We try to deal with this by avoiding manual QA we don't want people wasting time going through the product QAing it over and over, we rely more on automated testing. If you believe that a few short emails back and forth and IMs to keep people on the same page means your shafted,I guess we just have a different value on 30 minutes of non development time a day. I think in our last start up to much head down development killed the startup. Which isn't related to the documentation vs non documentation issue, but was still a PM mistake on our part.