Well, to be fair, they have taken that article and generalized it in a broader way, but based on what firsthand experience? Oh, right... firsthand experience re

Well, to be fair, they have taken that article and generalized it in a broader way, but based on what firsthand experience? Oh, right... firsthand experience reading the original article. It's so funny that people can take one or two articles and use them to build a case -- kind of like when DHH found that some successful companies were not run by MBAs and declared that MBAs don't really add much value (paraphrased). Here's the thing: The press prefers to report about things going wrong because that's what people like to read. For example, they'll report about people getting killed in traffic accidents, but they are unlikely to report on how many people didn't get killed on any given day. Should I therefore declare that people shouldn't drive cars and prove my point by linking to two articles about traffic accidents? I'd be laughed at, but then again, I'm not 37Signals. I have firsthand experience with the type of acquisition they are writing about. The experience was amazing! The company worked really hard to make us feel like part of the family, brought their best people in to help us scale everything up (including putting one of their founders on the team), and they drove tons of traffic to our app. Their stock climbed-up 10x over the course of my time there (but cashing out is all about timing, unfortunately), and I now have a network of really great friends in the industry -- many of which are now running their own successful startups. Ouch, right? I really got burned. I'm just one datapoint but, IMHO, one firsthand datapoint is all it takes to prove that their sweeping generalization isn't really worth paying attention to in this case.