I'll offer a counter-thought to the carping about how stupid this is, the ad hominem attacks, etc. The author is correct, at least for some ideas and some foun

I'll offer a counter-thought to the carping about how stupid this is, the ad hominem attacks, etc. The author is correct, at least for some ideas and some founders. The author also points out several successful products that grew from decidedly low-tech, sub-optimal incarnations. Technologists - and I consider myself a recovering technologist - are often distracted by the shiny, by the optimal, by the novel. Sometimes a product is a functional but ugly hack of adequate pieces assembled to prove whether or not an idea works, and, with a few very rare exceptions, is or should never be, at least not out of the gate, optimal. Sometimes technologists have cool ideas they build out into eventual products that once in a while become the core of a business. That can be a very long cycle. Business guys just keep doing business, much to the consternation of many of us tech guys. Product people talk to users, spend money on surveys, hack shit together, and see if things work, if ideas stick. Are we still fans of "fail fast" on HN? I haven't kept up. If you want to fail fast, do it for cheap, and do it low tech. IM(NS)HO, of course. YMMV.