Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
There are many factors in whether your startup makes it on its own
and/or gets bought out.
I feel that Paul over generalizes from his own experiences. Some dot
com millionaires were using Java and some LISPers are, no doubt, still
poor.
Well, I think he probably places too much emphasis on single factors.
Sure, Lisp helped, but, as he points out, Perl or Python probably would
have been close enough.
However, Graham is pretty obviously quite good at marketing. Look at
how many people he gets to read his writing.
In addition, he is apparently pretty sharp at business. He made the
comment that the investors allowed some of the founders to cash some
percentage of their stock at investment point. I have never heard of
such a deal before or since. That was pretty smart.
And, he cashed out. Some people probably scoff and say "he cashed out
way cheap." However, that's not clear. If he hadn't sold to Yahoo
then, who does he sell to later? Yahoo was going to buy *somebody* at
that point. Or, if he continues forward, he has to run a "storefront"
business and that starts taking real manpower for customer support
(which is primarily why Yahoo really didn't get as much value as they
thought). Lots of other businesses doing the same thing started flaming
out very shortly thereafter because they had to bulk up to handle
customer service. He had good timing--build the business when
expectations are low and get out before expectations get high. That was
also pretty smart.
Even with Arc, while the Lispers are scoffing, one person I met actually
pointed out that "Arc isn't for Lispers. Every single person who uses
Lisp and builds web apps *probably already does it that way*. Arc is
aimed at the people who think Ruby on Rails is cool but don't yet know
Ruby." That kinda stopped me short. Because if you look at it from
that direction, maybe he *is* on to something.
-a
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