The man brings up interesting points regarding the Mint.com merger and how 37signals handled the news, f-bombs be damned. Especially in regards to the differing metrics of incentives for startups, VCs and preexisting competitors.
Saying that the VCs forced Aaron to sell is an absolutely ludicrous statement.
People get confused between what the right thing is for a company's customers or the "ecosystem" and what the right thing is for the entrepreneur (even taking account of the other two).
As a Mint user I'm really sorry Mint sold to Intuit. I also think it is a bit of a waste for the ecosystem as Mint was positioned to do something pretty amazing that probably won't happen now.
However, the decision was very sensible indeed for the founder. Mint may never have sold, he could have been ousted as CEO. Now he's a great bet for future investors and employees and he is cash independent (both as an individual and an investor).
Knowing when to stick and when to twist is invaluable. I am interested though why the VC's cash him out $20M and keep in the game as Matt Mullenweg's did. That way he would have hedged his risk and everyone swings for the fences.
Style is an indicator of content. If someone uses five different colors and five different ways to emphasize text (I'm not exaggerating: count them) in the first few paragraphs of a blog post, then I expect the content to be equally lacking in thought.
These 'interesting points' have already been made a zillion times by a zillion different persons in the time since the Mint acquisition. Instead of shortly restating the argument, he seems to think he needs to repeat it a number of times in a row, with small variations. This certainly doesn't deserve the term 'essay'.
Have your expectations ever been proven wrong? I try to keep an open mind and pay more attention to the message than the messenger. I must say it's given me a few pleasant surprises (because I am not a buddha and naturally still have prejudices).
That said, I can see the humor in answering a post with a very provocative title in an even more provocative way.
It's just that I think that delivering the message is more important than the 'lol' factor, and maybe in this case the message is important enough that it would have been better served by some more moderate language.
Sure, we're all adults and so on, I'm no shrinking violet myself but I would think twice before writing like that. It's simply not conducive to getting your point across.
And, that's a fact, the points are pretty good. Even if Jason Frieds original article gets misrepresented a bit.
Jason brought that on himself by making his point in a vacuum, after all he had no idea of the backstory, so he shouldn't have used it as the main point of support for his argument.
The trouble now is that Jasons original argument is threatened to be lost because of that, and that's a pity because it too had merit.
Hard for a web 2.0 pimp: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2009/02/its-hard-out-he....
And in general seems to be a big proponent of that really tired "Im a rockstar ninja coder because I write facebook apps in rails" attitude. ( http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/07/kottke-is-wrong.... )
For someone who is a self-styled "master of 500 hats", he could work to be at least a 5 or 6 in writing and text layout.
for me, both entrepreneurship & technology are about passion. to remove that passion from my writing would seem to miss the point.
Dave can be very blunt sometimes.
I saw him on a panel earlier this year and he's just very direct. It's refreshing to get very honest answers. Some people just play too nice just not to offend anybody.
It's got to be 2-3x the length of Jason's original post ... and poorly written
Direct is bluntly and baldly stating claims that people find offensive and outrageous. You don't need to throw in extra invective on top of that.
See what I mean?
Bend over may refer to the action of bending one's body over, as in to pick up something, or, for example, as the hydra does in order to move when hunting, in dancing (like in the various breakdance moves), gymnastics, and sports (like snap football), as well as to be (vaginally or anally) penetrated in sexual activity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_over
so even if you took bend over literally there's nothing wrong (or anything implying anal sex) in saying that Mint guys bent over to pick-up Intuit's offer.
and while Jason Fried has actually added value by using such provocative but eloquent metaphor, Dave McClure has totally subtracted any little value that was in his rant by obscuring it with fucks etc.
i don't need to apologize for swearing... and similarly, you don't have to perform semantic acrobatics to find a different definition for "bending over".
jason certainly meant the headline in a "don't drop the soap" fashion, just like i meant to use the word "fuck" for emphasis.
get over yourself and get off your victorian soapbox. people swear. they've been doing it for hundreds of years.
if you can't get past the use of either as a literary form of emphasis, then you're the one being juvenile.