Looking at it from the other person's point of view, you can discover a surprising amount. The blog post was entirely bashing Ted, but it's pretty clear to me w

Looking at it from the other person's point of view, you can discover a surprising amount. The blog post was entirely bashing Ted, but it's pretty clear to me what happened -- Ted told his company he was going to leave (or at least hinted), and then was offered a ton of shiny things such as new projects to stay. The safer route is to stay, so he did. Why? Risk aversion; if he weren't risk averse, he'd already be doing his own startup. The other angle is dedication/excitement. It's easy to sell an idea remotely but when the crunch comes and you have to work on it, to realise just how much work there is, and how little you actually care. A great hacker has so much vying for her attention that she really won't work on just any random project because you talk the talk, it has to be something interesting that she actually cares about. The number of non-technical people who try to sell me ideas that I can code up for them is growing longer by the day.