> and i hate to be an ass, but ... under whose criteria does rethinkdb qualify for this, anyway? You're not being an ass. This is a question we struggle to ans

> and i hate to be an ass, but ... under whose criteria does rethinkdb qualify for this, anyway? You're not being an ass. This is a question we struggle to answer every day. (I'd argue that even very successful companies have to struggle to answer it every day if they want to remain successful.) I think that there are two separate issues here. The first is that many of these lessons came from messing things up with RethinkDB. RethinkDB didn't germinate this way at all -- many of the things we had to fix, and many things we can't fix so we have to live with their consequences daily. These lessons aren't right for everyone (and you can't hit the ballpark on all of them no matter how hard you try), but if I started another company, this is what I'd look out for and strive for. If you want to do something different (like open a dive shop in the Caribbean), that's awesome (really -- I mean that; I always feel a bit of envy for people who take this path). It's just not what I would do if I started another company. As for RethinkDB augmenting the human condition, this is a lot simpler than it seems. Thousands of people take time out of their day to learn Rethink and build cool things on top of it. In many cases RethinkDB is crucial to their livelihoods (because their products depend on Rethink working). Instead of spending their time on thing X, they spend it on Rethink, which gives everyone here a tremendous sense of joy. Since the adoption is growing extremely rapidly, it's giving us a great platform to reach more people. We have lots of things in mind that will allow people to do things they can't feasibly do today. That's augmenting the human condition. (You can't look too far out. We're not inventing flying cars, but if we can make scalable web apps accessible to people that couldn't do it before, well, that's augmenting the human condition for them.)