A Company of One
rishad.substack.com
rishad.substack.com
As with most paradigm shifts, many are sleeping on this. But expect small teams to be behind more and more of the most influential software of the next decade. And the traditional mindset on what is a company and how growth happens will also evolve.
It's not gonna replace us. It will help us to be more productive.
So if what was needed had five people and now three people can do that same job, two are let go. Of course, things will sort themselves out eventually, but whenever fast shifts occurs, a lot of throwing under a lot of buses will occur in the meantime.
Most founding code of products I have seen is the most fucked up, horrible, over- or under-engineered, hacky, buggy, usually platform-specific and NIH covered pile of hot shit.
Strong dependencies on half-assed internal data structures, stretch marks everywhere ("we did it like this because we had time pressure, and it was wrong, and now we cant get rid of it"), weird protocols ("we will just use a stringly-typed header for our high performance TCP communications, its easier to debug!"), lack of documentation ("no bro, the code is the documentation!"), and very little if any devops or testing (lol testing).
Thats good that way, too, otherwise products would never be launched. Thats why a lot of engineers will not launch a product, ever - their standards are too high and theyre too hung up on doing it right, that their window of opportunity for their niche fades.
The one thing I haven't seen a single startup or upcoming product struggle with is quickly churning out a lot of code that mostly/fully does the job and sells.
Unless AI can replace engineers like me, half of who's job experience is cleaning up, streamlining and refactoring these "quick launch" codebases, in order to make the code last even if core engineers leave and to make onboarding easier, we are NOT going to see a massive revolution of AI programming tools.
The most common problem is they never ship anything.
Or they ship something no one needs.
Or they ship something people need but don't know how distribution works so those people never find it.
I'm someone who's spent enough time writing high quality code that my default thinking is in line with yours, but the truth is it's a privilege to get to a place where you can afford to hire people to clean up your "quick launch" codebase.
Even if you look at it from a place of personal pride, there is more pride in proving your idea solves real problems for real people today, than there is in chasing an ideal codebase that scales better tomorrow when you don't even have proof anyone wants it.
> Most founding code of products I have seen is the most fucked up, horrible, over- or under-engineered, hacky, buggy, usually platform-specific and NIH covered pile of hot shit.
I dunno your background, but I think you have it almost completely, 100% incorrect in your first paragraph, while being completely, 100% correct in your second.
The summary is this: if you're launching a product, you want to do it as soon as possible, damn the quality of the code as long as the quality of the product is sufficient.
The reason for this is because, 9 times out of 10, you're going to be throwing all that code away anyway! It's rare that the first product you ship is successful.
And if it does get successful? Well, then you have the money to redo it, refinish it, polish it, address tech debt, whatever.
There's only two outcomes: the product succeeds or it fails.
If, in the rare case, you launch a successful product and the code is clean, perfect, etc, you haven't gained anything over the person who launched a half-assed, broken-but-still-sufficient successful product. The competitor can still get his product to your standards because they succeeded.
If you fail, then you have spent unnecessary time determining what doesn't work, while the competitor has spent less time and can attempt another product after his failure, while you're still perfecting your first failure.
The biggest issue for founder-type programmers [when their product is successful and now they need to grow it] is not code volume, its code quality.
I think this is where I disagree - cutting corners is really not faster. Especially now a days with the tech and libraries we have available, you don't have to overthink or overbuild either. Cutting corners saves no time, and then the startup needs to pivot and can't easily due to the ham strung code.
"Useful tech debt", etc is usually just an excuse for impatient devs or people who aren't very good.
However, that being said ...
> I think this is where I disagree - cutting corners is really not faster. Especially now a days with the tech and libraries we have available, you don't have to overthink or overbuild either.
Cutting corners saves a boatload of time if you're only ever testing the Happy Path. HP-only testing, alone, roughly halves the time to ship a product, once you realise that no dependency-injection would be required so you just hard-code the dependencies in the class hierarchy or data structures.
More time can be saved by sticking to a single platform ("Does this Go program work on Windows too?" "Meh. Who cares?"), yanking in every library there is ("Why does this run so slow?" "Because developing for Electron is faster than making a native app").
The point is, quality takes time. It takes longer to prepare a great meal from fresh ingredients than it does to simply assemble a picnic from nothing but KFC, McDonalds and Krispy Kreem. It takes longer to build a house from concrete and block than from wood and siding.
> Cutting corners saves no time, and then the startup needs to pivot and can't easily due to the ham strung code.
If the startup is pivoting, then they're likely throwing away most of what they built anyway. That's the whole point of the pivot - you switch from producing a product for solving $FOO to a product for solving $BAR.
If you aren't throwing away most of what you have written, you aren't pivoting.
Even as someone who grew up well below the poverty line, this wasn’t true ime. The vast majority of adults aren’t impoverished. They’re quite clearly choosing not to work the shitty jobs that would make them impoverished, usually through skills they’ve chosen to acquire.
While I don’t have the stats on what percentage of people exercise job choice — these stats are completely unobtainable - I don’t think there’s an argument that can reasonably suggest it’s >50 (or even 20)
Sure, people can upskill or move across the country, but that's prohibitively expensive and not guaranteed to work. A lot of people are trapped by this.
Also, defense contractors frequently have multiple customers, in a way. First, many contractors sell their stuff to foreign customers (after getting approval from the USG of course, frequently with degraded capabilities). Lots of countries are buying the F-35 for instance. Also, contractors frequently have multiple customers within the government. They might sell to the Air Force and the Army, for instance, or the CIA and the NSA. Those are all different agencies, and act like different customers, without that much coordination between them, and each has its own funding and does its own contracts with contractors.
> Web-3 while out of favor will eventually enable more ownership and equity for individuals.
Giant red flag not to trust anything this guy says, since he has zero clue.
I think the genz are very aware of this.
When people say they find the "very idea of billionaires" abhorrent, what exactly is the solution here? After the stock in your company becomes worth > billion you have to give it away for free? Because selling it means you are still a billionaire. I think there is something to be said about inheritance taxes and limiting the infinite perpetuation of wealth through generations but unless we are talking asset seizure I am not quite sure how you would do away with the Musks, Brins, Gates' etc. of today.
Yes. Arguably it was never rightfully theirs to begin with—owning someone else's labor output without working yourself is a pretty antisocial act.
Furthermore I'd argue that billionaires have repeatedly demonstrated they are unable to invest in public good. Philanthropy used to be a thing; even the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a pathetic shadow of that practice with obvious ideological blind spots.
This is what happens when you buy literally anything. What is the distinction you are trying to make?
Well presumably if you buy from the sole creator of a product, they're justly compensated as they could simply refuse the sale. Buying from a privately owned enterprise allows the owners of the enterprise to siphon off of the work of the people who actually build the phone without contributing anything themselves. That doesn't sit right with me, and it doesn't sit right with a lot of people. This creates hugely perverse incentives that magnify to global economic dysfunction and inefficiency and irrational resource distribution and social volatility. The world we live in!
There’s a quote[1] which makes the rounds occasionally and I think sums up the sentiment pretty well:
> Ok how about this:
> No more billionaires. None.
> After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care.
> You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you.
---
> Most billionaires net worth is highly centralised in the stock of the companies they founded[...] unless we are talking asset seizure I am not quite sure how you would do away with [billionaires]
Marginal asset tax rate of 100%? (Really, the main difference between that and the inheritance tax you favor is the timing.) The Wikipedia article[2] has a bunch of arguments for why that might be a bad idea, but it’s reasonably straightforward in principle.
[1] https://twitter.com/Mikel_Jollett/status/1241843944238923777
It's called taxes, death, and children. Billionaires only have a single lifetime to spend their wealth, taxed at pretty high rates when they actually liquidate their assets, and it eventually evaporates over a few generations.
There's ~3k billionaires and they're powerful enough that they'll be able to avoid those caps through loopholes, like through shell companies. There's no real practical way to prevent someone from accumulating wealth if they wanted to continue to do so.
That quote about no more billionaires is from someone that cares more about making a point than actual policy.
Not within a capitalist system, no. There are other systems though.
Investors are buying the company's stock, why would it be theirs?
Especially after going public, it's not "your" company anymore.
That is basically what the book Company of One says, yes. Zero to Sold is also another good book in the same vein.
Eventually you (the founder) won't be needed anymore.
From a look at the two books mentioned here, though, neither seem to clear that bar.
Zero to Sold is about FeedbackPanda, which took 2 years. (Still impressive.) And Company of One, from a skim, appears to focus on services businesses — totally reasonable to get to six-figure revenue and therefore seven-figure valuation, but not terribly interesting as product companies and fairly difficult to exit via a sale.
I'd love to see some case studies of the 3-month number. The more I think about it, the more possible it seems (with a fair bit of luck).
Services companies are very fast to get started, and very easy to make profitable.
Building a product company on the other hand...
Small, highly profitable companies are totally feasible. But making a big splash with a product (not just consulting / freelancing) is extremely difficult as a single person.
Top of my head plentyoffish and minecraft are the two main ones that probably everyone heard of? If you relax the condition of 1 programmer a bit then whatsapp is certainly up there.
Also if you consider btc a product (although I am not a fan of crypto) and don't believe the theories about satoshi being a group, then btc is definitely up there. In fact this one needed almost less than one programmer since you had to do very little 'maintenance' after the codebase stabilised.
I think if you're going to use analogies, you should stay away from things you don't really know about.
Wonder Woman exists in a different universe from Iron Man - One's DC (Justice League, WW, Superman, etc) and the other is Marvel (Avengers, Iron Man, Hulk, etc).
This should never have been the question in the first place!