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So you just put it into production without permission? Makes sense that you two went on to Google.

• KMag 6y ago
  > So you just put it into production without permission? Makes sense that you two went on to Google. Well, we went to Google because the RIAA filed a lawsuit and it was clear the owner didn't have a great plan of what to do, vacillating between shutting down the company and fighting the lawsuit. Another year or two later, a third of the five developers joined us at Google and the other two were at hedge funds. It was a 5-developer startup. Everything was played fast-and-loose. It was a P2P file sharing startup, post-Napster, clearly a risk-taking environment. It was a minor offense in that corporate culture, and it made a 90% drop in one of our biggest expenses. It was a 13-person company pulling in over 1 million USD / month in revenue. It was clearly a smart risk to take, we were monitoring it, and it would have taken literally seconds to undo it. Also, the Bulgarian Nuclear Option guy (not the other C++ dev) didn't get fired. You could plot a technical mutiny to thwart a corporate legal settlement, and get off with a stern warning. That's the kind of company it was.