TLDR DHH publicly rationalizes his own mediocrity using various flawed arguments.
Gates, OK, I may agree with him, due to the amount of charity he's doing, but the rest? Elon Musk is still a big question mark (see Tesla vs tinkering), the others... Why not put Marissa Mayer on the list, she made a lof of money as well.
I'd rather see a list of people like RMS, even though he's quite mad, he actually made the word a better place.
I don't get all starry eyed with tales of people who made billions by doing questionable things and then giving it away as charity later.
Care to offer some counter arguments?
Nokia's anecdotal demise isn't a reason to not seek continuous success. In fact, one could use that same anecdote to argue that having enough leads to failure.
Distance between a founder and the product isn't an argument for not seeking continuous success. Some people prefer that distance and consider separation of labor to be more efficient.
It's clear that DHH has some bias against success. Given articles like this and his public bet that Facebook's share price would fail. It isn't based in logic though, just ideology.
Quite on the contrary I and many others think of him as extremely successful:
Profitable since year 2 IIRC
Have built nice products that you can pay for by money (instead of by privacy)
Well known for a certain web framework that 100 000s of developers use and many love.
I'd even go so far as to say he influenced (not shaped though) our entire industry by showing how web development should be done in a world filled with ugliness like: old enterprise Java, old Spring, old Asp.Net webforms, old PHP etc.
As a happy employee of Basecamp, this line makes me proud.
Feel free to make products in other markets as well - as long as they are profitable.
I want you to stay around :-)
Do you know what "contradict" means? Because that in no way contradicts his point that there are many paths, of which continuous growth is only one.
Nokia's anecdotal demise isn't a reason to not seek continuous success.
He didn't claim it was.
Distance between a founder and the product isn't an argument for not seeking continuous success. Some people prefer that distance and consider separation of labor to be more efficient.
Which is what he said. "Now some people clearly like that."