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Comment by brasmusen | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how many of this type of post are showing up everywhere. In the past couple weeks I've seen 4-5 posts on what founders did wrong or right with their companies.

It must be nice to be past all that and looking back on it to glean the lessons. Can't wait to get there.

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It's a personal entrepreneur's list of what to do (or not) and I find them useful.

Taken as a whole, it's cliff notes for entrepreneurial hackers.

Cliff notes are useless for college-level classes. Does your analogy hold in the real world of entrepreneurship?

Yes. Having "front lines" advice and anecdotes from actually building a startup are helpful even if they are only tidbits (i.e. cliff notes) of information.

Founders at Work is a great example of this.

It's probably the aftermath of the 05-07 startup boom and the weak economy. Startups are failing now, but since many of them didn't take VC, all we get are lots of postmortems. Also, solo entrepreneurs have fewer toes to step on and don't need to worry so much about airing their company's dirty laundry.

There was a similar boom in printed books after 2001 - anyone ever go to their library's business history section and read all the stories about dot-bomb flameouts? Now that just shows up on the web.

There have been a lot of posts about failed startups. This is about a successful startup and the problems it survived. Doing a diff between this and the other posts might prove useful.

One thing I notice is the failure stories always include problems with their toolset. This could-have-failed-but-didn't story does not. I think the "programming languages don't matter" crowd should pay attention.

This is probably selection bias. Everybody has problems with their tools, because all non-custom-made tools are compromises to fill the needs of multiple users. When you fail, there's always something where you can say "I wish we hadn't used this tool and had tried something better." While if you succeed, the tool headaches kinda fade into the background and just don't seem that important.

When I wrote up my postmortem (http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/), I wished I'd prototyped things out more. This was intended as a general statement about process and not an indictment of any particular toolset (though I still wouldn't use JSF for any Web2.0 site ;-)). I think tools matter, but doing your homework matters more, and the best tool usually depends on the job.

I noticed that a lot of this guy's points seemed to concern doing your homework up front and not feeling time-pressured to act immediately. That's something I noticed a lot in my startup: you always know far less than you think at the start, and it's worthwhile to validate your starting assumptions before you go off the deep end on them.

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