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Comment by TimothyFitz | Hacker News Reader

"The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing – building for scale isn’t the problem anymore. I can build a hack protytype that works well into the "validation" stage to establish a funding event or customer revenue stream then use the new capital to rebuild, hire and grow."

This interestingly follows my own career growth. I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU for a long time, but eventually our bottleneck clearly shifted from reliability back to marketing/product development. Around that time I switched teams, and have since been the tech lead for our marketing team. It might sound less sexy to other engineers, but getting to be on the bleeding edge of marketing for virtual economies is constantly challenging and fun; especially with IMVU's data driven culture.

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Do you think IMVU would be the great company it is today if it started with two product marketing folks and one business "model engineer" and all the programming was outsourced to "commodity" coders in elance.com or getafreelancer.com?

that seems to be a reaction to an exaggeration of what Tim said. He clearly said(emphasis mine)

"I was the tech lead responsible for scalability/reliability at IMVU for a long time, but eventually our bottleneck clearly shifted from reliability back to marketing/product development. "

I read it as, "Once we got reliability sorted out, the bottleneck moved to marketing/product development."

He never said IMVU could have been built without good programmers(of which class, he is an instance), but product dev/marketing became (or were) equally important (or more important) and so he moved to that team. At least that's how I read it

I agree. However the point I was trying to make is that technology expertise continues to be a "scarce talent" which seems to be the opposite view of that supported by Tim's post.

I can second that, particularly for IMVU. The economics in play there are deep and complicated on many levels.

Yeah, here's a little known fact about IMVU's economy: Most products allow derivation, which gives content creators the ability to tweak/remix/reskin the product and publish the changes back to the catalog. Pick a markup for the remixed version and presto, everyone in the derivation chain gets paid their respective markups for every sale. There are only a handful of root nodes; nearly every product is a derivation of another product.

Beyond the product side of the economy, which is fascinating to me in it's own right (for some of the reasons you mentioned), the service economy around room rental, sales positions for goods and modeling services are just as interesting as well (let alone the complications of exchange rate, credit inflation, and other economic concerns).

Did you take a leaf out of Ted Nelsons book for that or did you come up with it independently ?

Which book are you referring to?

I wasn't the one who came up with the idea for this feature. The initial version of IMVU had this feature, so it's at least 5 years old.

Ted Nelson had a project called Xanadu, that amongst many other things kept track of partial contributions to derivative creations.

If you came up with this independently you may want to look into to the Xanadu project for more inspiration along these lines, it is definitely very interesting reading.

Ahh yes, I'm familiar (though not familiar enough) with project Xanadu. The concept of keeping track of derivations is fairly common; far less common is the idea of derivation for the express purpose of indicating participation in the value chain and thus participation in the compensation.

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