"If a one-person company is going to build a product, it can’t have any of those huge time-sink features."

"I built Instapaper...with a custom high-performance MVC framework"

I'm confused: how does he square 'use mature tools that are widely used, and 'as a one-person shop, only build one or two features of moderate complexity' with 'write your own custom web framework and ORM'?