Archive for 1997

Humans are fascinated by the beginning of things and the ending of things.

We even have a word for the start of a business.

Start-ups.

We should have a word for businesses that are stable and established, perhaps we call them end-ups.

The interesting thing about start-ups is that they don’t much but have nothing to lose.

But end-ups have abundance with everything to lose.

If you are building an MVP, and you’re pre-seed, pretty much everyone is working for free so don’t ever try and get all the details right.

Detail work for just about everyone, is drudge work.

Nudge this.

Polish that.

Tweak that other thing.

Drudgery!

You want to burn through developers faster than you can convince them to work for free?

Give them drudge work.

You want your developer to stick around?

Give them interesting problems full of green field code and they’ll stick around (and make fast progress) almost indefinitely.

You’re building an MVP, the moment you try and make any one detail perfect, you’ve immediately failed at building your MVP.

You have a major problem when the passionate employees in your organization have suddenly stopped talking and stopped being passionate about the problems they are solving.

The one defining characteristic of every great software developer I ever worked with, and in fact every great engineer I ever worked with, was that they had an insatiable curiousity of mind.