Not for sale
37signals.com
37signals.com
I would pay good money to obtain access to a stream of intrinsically interesting content without any of this overstated, undersupported crap.
Edit: My (overstated? undersupported?) assertion that this article is overstated, undersupported crap is now the top comment. The irony is disturbing. I hope someone builds a product that eliminates these frustrations for me (and others) in the future.
I barely have time for one or two HN stories a day, now, and I haven't been to Reddit since picking Taco up at the airport.
I guess I'm just frustrated that the current structure of web has created all sorts of malincentives around the exchange of knowledge. Trollish content attracts more attention, so well-meaning creators of worthwhile content are incentivized to wrap legitimate ideas in trollish presentation in order to reach a larger audience.
I wish this weren't the case. I hope it changes in the future.
For example, my Australian Kelpie is now about eight years old. She spends most of her day sleeping. She has to be let in or out once every few hours so she can look for kitties, and I take her for a 20 minute walk in the evenings before bed. She spends the rest of the day napping while I program, read, or play games.
He doesn't help real people solve real problems. He's a hopester.
Packaging is important. It can be just as important to focus on the failures, but we don't see that a lot. People don't want to talk about their failures. It's hard to find the failures though, they aren't as famous. We can really learn a lot from failures though.
I believe it may be precisely because we don't see many failures that we keep failing. It's very difficult to understand why a company succeeded. We aren't told about the neighbor who had $1 M to invest or the happenstance that led to a great sale.
It's easier to identify reasons we fail and help us avoid them. Oddly, most failures we read about are due to the environment created by vc. Expectations, short runways, business/techie conflict, yet we continue to be led to believe that vc is a good thing for entrepreneurs. If you run the numbers, the first decision you should make as first time entrepreneur is to avoid VC.
Bootstrap the first one and get VC for the second one. Or, as some suggested to me in the past, get VC for an easy idea you don't really care about. Sell the investors that idea, keep the good one for yourself, then use the money to fuel what you're really passionate about.
That is what I like about him. He asks hard questions and if you don't answer he asks why not. Great journalist in my opinion.
Here's my upcoming guest list: http://mixergy.com/upcoming
What do you think I should ask any of them to make the programs more useful?
Ask Fred about Zynga and why he was quiet about it so long. Why does he think what they were doing is acceptable? Ask him why he doesn't push Zynga to give the ill gotten gains back.
Ask the VCs how to techies can manage expectations and package their startups in a way that can help them better understand them. What motivates them to invest in a particular startup. Do they actually read emails? What's the best way to contact them? What is an introverted techie to do? Can a techie focus on the tech stuff and still succeed in a VC backed startup? How?
For Ed of course, what kinds of prejudices did he face in a world dominated by twenty somethings? How did he balance risk inherent in older life with risk in a startup? What is different at that age than a 20 something entrepreneur? Do people respect his opinions more or was he considered washed up? Why did he wait so long? How has the environment changed over the past couple of decades?
Hearing other people's stories and ideas is great, but at the end of the day, it's just fluff. Only by trying to start a successful company will you actually figure out what works for you and what doesn't. Obviously, no one wants to hear that. They'd rather hear convenient doctrine, packaged up nicely in a book or podcast, that makes founding a successful company as easy as baking cookies. Here's the newsflash for those people: That recipe doesn't actually exist.
Edit: And I do not know who the best is. But being second best is always better, you have room to grow.
That's been my frustration. It's good to hear these people explain their success, but if you managed to squeeze a bit more detail out of them, I would even consider becoming a Mixergy subscriber.
So I just read these articles (or watch interviews) in the hope of just getting new insights and not looking for a sure way to make millions.
"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
Now, Steve didn't flip Apple, he didn't sell out. But the point is that he did start over from scratch. 37signals are right that building a business for the principal purpose of flipping it is probably a perverse goal. But being a serial entrepreneur is not a bad thing, and Jobs is precisely an example of why it's not a bad thing.
I'd also add that Warren Buffett isn't an entrepruer in the same sense that someone running a tech startup is.
Exactly, it's rather silly to expect a tech entrepreneur to follow the same career path as Warren Buffett.
Now we have a set of cliches for a small funky online company should act.
It is all about subverting the dominant X paradigm where X is anything that you don't like or don't use or don't understand.
- Only use Apple computers to subvert the dominant Windows OS paradigm
- Only use Rails to subvert the dominant PHP/Java paradigm
- Only use Textmate for editing to subvert the dominant Vim/Emacs/Notepad/Eclipse paradigm
- Use swear words in your presentations to subvert the dominant politeness-to-people-who-pay-into-conferences paradigm
I could go on. I am generalising here too! But sooner or later 37s may wake up and realise that they are the new mainstream amongst the web dev crowd.
They have slayed the monster of PHP/Java.
Perhaps its is time to stop playing the hip outsider?
Also, there are still many, many, many more PHP and Java developers and shops out there than there are Rails. That shift is far from done.
Once the good ideas have become mainstream, the work on those are done, but by then I'm sure even better ideas are available and the process starts anew.
This is not bad, this is healthy.
Don't get me wrong, I have worked with Rails - I admire what 37s have done and a good rate of churn in new ideas in any profession can be healthy and welcome thing.
I just wonder if 37s have gone from being the underdogs? What do you rebel against when you are the status quo - at least among the opinion formers and alpha geeks?
It is like when a renegade leftfield music act become mainstream. Look at Rage Against the Machine (with their leftist anti-capitalist music) becoming millionaires after signing up to one of the biggest capitalist music corporations on the planet.
If the companies, many who were my clients with VC, had gone a little slower and taken a little more time they would have been long time established players. Instead, another company years later -- also backed by VC -- comes in and takes the market that, years prior, wasn't big enough to support investor expectations.
During the dotcom boom, I saw multiple layoffs at multiple companies. I saw people crying. I saw founders of companies let go. I heard people say, "Just let me stay. I love working here. You don't have to pay me!" Sorry, that isn't an option in a VC backed company.
Yet, I don't know one bootstrapped startup who would say no to a loyal team mate who wants to work and build something without needing a salary.
What they're saying is build a business, not just a thing to flip. Focusing on the business will, even if you end up selling it to someone else, make it a better venture in the end, and more satisfying to you as a person.
And my next company will be something wayyy out there -- probably so far out that I can't get funding because it's too risky. The only reason I can do that is because I sold my first two companies very early on and I have just enough financial wiggle room to where I can, for now, take some risks. I see companies like 37Signals making safe, predictable product bets and leaning on their brand and existing customer base for income, and that's fine. But the world needs risk takers, too. And taking risk requires capital and if that means selling a couple of companies before they turn into empires, then count me in! If I were to do it all over, I wouldn't change a thing.
Also, there are other reasons to sell than "some sucker is willing to pay x". Maybe you are burnt out, want to spend more time with your family, try something new, take some risk off the table.
There is a nugget of truth in much of what 37signals says, but it is always stated in such absolute terms that it becomes off-putting.
Similarly, DHH isn't writing "don't sell your business if you burn out". If you burn out and you can't fix it, do right by your team. DHH is critiquing the notion that you should build to flip, and the notion that there's great honor in doing that repeatedly. It's undeniable that there is a mythology around "serial entrepeneurs" who repeatedly flip companies.
You know what would be incredibly boring? A DHH post that anticipated and acknowledged every special case and every objection. "What if someone offered you $1Tn" is an especially b o r i n g objection. One of the reasons people read DHH's articles and don't read ours is that we write things like "Of course, if someone offers you $100MM, you should blah blah b l a h b l a h", and he doesn't.
It is also OK for him to be wrong. Being wrong --- at least, when you're not writing about password hashing --- does not put a point on your blogging license. The bar is, "is it interesting and does it come from an honest place".
The fact is, nobody is offering 37Signals a trillion dollars with no strings attached. Actual offers would involve non-competes, possibly demands the founders stay on for a year or more, the right to fire employees, the right to raise prices or otherwise make things unpleasant for customers the founders like, and so on.
We can't say "Everyone's soul is for sale at the right price," get a yes, and then come back to reality and pull out a two hundred page term sheet and demand that they consider it since "We've established that they're for sale."
This is roughly akin to asking me if I would work for Microsoft if given a million dollar signing bonus. Does that mean I'm open to working for Micosoft? Or can I stick to my assertion that I'm not interested in working for Micosoft now or in the foreseeable future?
Selling your company only makes sense if you think they can do a better job than you can. Or when you think they’re overvaluing the prospects of your company. That’s either the talk of the meek or a con man (“let’s get these suckers to overpay for this company of questionable value…”).
Of course the trillion dollar number is ridiculous (just trying to make a point) but you can insert whatever number you want. DHH directly says you should only sell if you think the buyer can do better or if they overvalue your company.
As far as selling because you think the buyer can do better goes, does anyone actually do that? How many people are strong enough to build a company to the point where someone wants to buy it and then suddenly turn meek when the offer is on the table?
Selling your company doesn't make you a con man either. Even if someone overpays. If someone overpays, should you offer to give back the difference?
Like I said in my original comment, there is a lot of truth in what 37signals has to say, including this post, but sometimes they stretch it too far.
What's the mission now that there is a computer on every desktop and in every household? Is it as clear? Is it as direct? Will it last for a decade or more? Is it meaningful to every employee?
All I need is someone to answer that question for me and I'll be ready to change my mind.
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This attitude is the reason I don't blog anymore. You don't just disagree with them. You're put out that they're writing at all. I understand where you're coming from and I sympathize but that attitude is oppressive and stifling and I wish people would dial it down. I'm one of the culprits too (hoist me up by anything I've written about pg). I hope people call me on it too.
For me, it's absolutely not hacker news. I don't know what it is.
If they want some respect, write some software! Blog about some cool technology. Solve a hard problem.
edit: deleted my previous posts. I'm not going to comment on any more of these posts.
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[seems like the parent poster chicken out and deleted his comment]
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If you look at the HN thread of the TWiST video, many were claiming they're just gassing the potential buyers up by saying they're not for sale.
I don't get why its really that hard to believe. Loving what you do is the thing I strive for, and they seem to have found it. Why mess with it?
People can say you can flip it and start anew, but 37signals has (according to DHH) enough to not worry financially and if they have a great new startup idea, why would they start a new company to do it? They have a company that they own and have the freedom to implement and launch products that they think are great.
It just so happens these same people ultimately have the most success because it gives them the endurance to stick with it.
Now, the benefits are often illusory (see: pretty much anything Conde Nast has acquired). But sometimes it's actually true - particularly when there are economies of scale or actual (I hate this word) synergies.
This is pretty much the Google promise, isn't it? "Get bought by Google, get access to infrastructure you could never afford on your own!" This makes sense for some businesses, not so much for others (FWIW, 37s is probably in the latter category).
Who's the sucker now?
The biggest disadvantage is that big companies that are willing to buy aren't risk takers ... they'll either dilute your idea, or kill your project. Google is my kind of company, but they've killed at least a couple of startups they've bought already.
Of course, I wouldn't place 37signals in the same league. But he does have a point ... if your company can handle the growth without external resources, than why sell?
2. He is saying that if you are a buyer then you are doing it "for the vision", but if you are a seller then you are doing it just for "a quick flip". I doubt that very much.
For the record, many of the listed business leaders have sold businesses, and considered selling their flagship businesses but felt the offers were too low. I remember reading this specifically about Google, but don't want to find a source (searching "google acquisition" isn't really helpful these days). Jobs sold NeXT; I think he would have sold NeXT even if Apple was not the buyer. etc.
Buffet et al are driven by practicality. Dynastic ambitions are an obstruction on the way to Buffet's status.
First, he says he would never sell the company, not for 150 million dollars, because he's not in it for the money. So, ok, he won't sell the company.
However, he also said, you should always be working on your best idea. If you're not working on your best idea, then you're doing it wrong.
He says that 37 signals and its products are his best ideas.
Ok, following me? If one day, he came up with some idea out of the blue, out of inspiration, out of some life-changing event, out of...wherever.... and that turned out to be a better idea than 37 signals....ummmm then what?
Then he should sell his company to go work on that "best idea". No?
2. he addressed that - at least this idea works for them right now and had for past 10 years
3. starting from scratch now will not yield answer to whether new idea was better in next 10 years
You wouldn't exactly have a 37 signals homepage that showcases Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, and now introducing World Feed, the solution to World Hunger!
There's nothing wrong with that. The person who's consistently able to spot talent may not be good at nurturing said talent. That's why some people are headhunters and others are coaches. It has nothing to do with meekness.
Each of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet have created 3+ billion dollar businesses each. Steve and Warren have sold multiple companies when the prices rose above 1 billion. Larry treats sailing and real estate like a startup designed to flip as well.