> Simple Outperformed Smart. As a self-admitted elitist, it pains me to say this, but it’s true: the startups we audited that are now doing the best usually had

> Simple Outperformed Smart. As a self-admitted elitist, it pains me to say this, but it’s true: the startups we audited that are now doing the best usually had an almost brazenly ‘Keep It Simple’ approach to engineering. My hunch is that this is related to the nature of product-market fit. If a company is very successful, there's a decent shot that market demand became overwhelming at some point early on. That demand, in turn, becomes a strong motivator to keep things simple and ship quickly, instead of writing code The Right Way. Facebook using PHP might be one of the best examples of this: if their user base didn't explode, maybe they would've taken the time to carefully rewrite their code in Java or Python. But the fact that they would've had time to do that would've made it less likely that they'd become $500b company today.