Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

Chapter 7. Mind the Gap When

You don’t want small in the sense of a village, but small in the sense of an all-star team.

Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If anything, it’s more like the first five.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing. There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. If someone sat down and wrote a web browser that didn’t suck (a fine idea, by the way), the world would be that much

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.

Use your software yourself, all the time. Viaweb was supposed to be an online store builder, but we used it to make our own site too. Don’t listen to marketing people or designers or product managers just because of their job titles. If they have good ideas, use them, but it’s up to you to decide; software has to be designed by hackers who understa

You can literally launch your product as three guys operating out of an apartment, with a server collocated at an ISP. We did.

The classic startup is fast and informal, with few people and little money. Those few people work very hard, and technology magnifies the effect of the decisions they make. If they win, they win big.