One thing I wish I understood earlier in my career is that value creation is not the same as value capture. You might create a lot of value (say, by growing a lot of berries on your farm) but you might not receive much of the profits (i.e. you can’t capture the value you’ve created). This is largely due to industry structure (see Michael Porter’s body of work) dictating where profits flow....
In an ideal world, all software projects would be written well. Full test suite, a good ci/cd pipeline, and a general focus on maintainability. If that’s the world you live in, or your org spends a lot of time from the onset of a project optimizing for a clean codebase, this is nirvana. One well kept monolith keeps complexity down across the board. No complicated SOA, deployment tooling, or failure case handling....
Equity makes me complicit. Money is what really matters they say. Sprint for five to ten years and you’ll make it. That bank account will be big enough so that you can finally stop being unhappy, and transition to the nirvana state of happiness. Negotiating on an equity package is subtle self propaganda. You are signaling that you buy into the idea of working like crazy right now for a pay off later into the future....
I had a miniature crisis in January with my new SaaS product for wrestling teams. I was working on weekends and generally making myself miserable, due to an arbitrary deadline I had set for myself. The thing about that arbitrary deadline? No one cared. I told the team I’m working with that I would be pushing back the launch until after the season, and the coach just said “Sounds good to me!...
There was a brief period of time during my senior year of college when I got the idea into my head that I should take a year off and pursue a startup. I had a prototype of mobile support software running (think Wufoo for apps), so I scheduled a meeting with a local angel investor. I’m paraphrasing, but his words went something like this: First of all, don’t quit school....