All great points. As for shipping first, see Netscape and Dos. For heroic hours being the norm, see Facebook and Google. As for shitty management and someone g

All great points. As for shipping first, see Netscape and Dos. For heroic hours being the norm, see Facebook and Google. As for shitty management and someone getting sick and breakage before a big demo, not necessarily. I've been a part of small teams most of my professional career. So many times the only way to get big fish to bite be was to both overpromise and over-achieve, and with small teams this usually meant grinding through tough situations like those above. You don't always know with enough time to spare when you have a chance to demo new functionality for a really big fish. With sickness, it is the redundancy of skills and codebase knowledge that have led me to take one on the chin.