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Comment by nrao123 | Hacker News Reader

I am big fans of 37s. I learnt a lot from reading thier blog posts especially thier unconventional (at that time) thinking to avoid crazy detailed requirement docs, focus on blank error states etc...

However, DHH's constant railing against the VC backed world seems a little tiresome. There seems to be a religious fervor to his essays that thier way is morally better (e.g. thier business model seems like a honest transaction vs VC backed startups who inflate numbers etc).

I think a lot of people get that raising VC is not the only way to build a business (there is even a nice tradeoff statement (do you want to be Rich Vs King).

It's a choice one makes. It's not morally inferior or superior to raise VCs or to bootstrap.

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I take the 'constant railing' as you call it as more of a reminder that there is a choice - 99% of the voices you hear in this world only talk about the VC backed method so the other 1% of voices tend to have to speak a little louder.

> However, DHH's constant railing against the VC backed world seems a little tiresome

...and yet so many young founders and employees are swindled into starting or working for the next unicorn of the world, giving away massive amounts of equity in their company. Killing themselves slowly by working 80 hour work weeks.

At some point we need to start doing a better job of educating college grads that can program, design, engineer, etc. The more DHH's constant railing continues the better.

Isn't it? There's a history of con games (in both directions) in the VC world. It seems intuitive to me that it's easier for a "king" company to stay more focused on product and customers, and less on growth - sooner or later, if you're determined to grow at all costs, you'll have to decide to do something that hurts your customers, your team, your soul, in order to chase that growth.

I mean, this isn't proof or anything. But there seems to be some intuitive truth to DHH's position.

What do you mean by history of con games?

I guess it's possible to build large businesses like Google, Facebook, Uber, Apple etc without taking VC money but its a choice that these founders made that taking VC money helps them increase the odds that they will achieve thier goals.

What's wrong with that?

On the other hand- you have perfectly good businesses like Craigslist, ESRI, SAS, Zoho who did it without raising VC money. Nothing wrong with that either.

Just different choices made by the founders of these companies.

Microsoft is also a famous example of company that did not take VC money.

Microsoft's founders met at prep school - both were from well off families in the Pacific Northwest. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a little more family help available when starting their company than most.

Not that they aren't an example of a company that did not take VC money, just that they may not be a particularly good example for most looking to follow that path.

DHH constantly rails against many things - it seems to be his natural idle state.

"Constantly railing against X" is not a strange thing to do when X remains a problem for a long time, and people are either having a hard time or are unwilling to face it.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In this case, I'd say it's a good thing.

There seems to be a religious fervor to his essays that thier way is morally better

Weird, reading this thing, I never got a sense that he was saying that his approach was better, only that it wasn't worse...

> focus on blank error states

What does this phrase mean?

https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_Three_State_Solution....

I believe s/he meant blank and error states - the screen the user sees when there is no data to display.

In short, 37 signals believe this screen should not display an empty list, but instead serve as a guide to the user. This is commonplace now ("You have nothing to read yet, [button]add someting[/button]"), but first mentions of this are from over 10 years ago: https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000375.php

Are the blog posts still available?

Yes - you can see thier archives. Here is an example : https://signalvnoise.com/archives/001050.php

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