Founders at Work.pdf

Joel Spolsky 355
had an idea of some way that we could modify FogBugz to be really useful to
the investment community as something—I don’t remember what, but something
that the investment community could really use that’s 5 percent different
than FogBugz. And I kept thinking, “This is a huge distraction, and there’s not
a big enough market. I just want to stick to our core competency, and I’m not
interested in doing software for the financial markets.” He kept saying, “No, no.
You’ve got to talk to this guy. You could make a lot of money off this. It would be
great.”
I kept thinking, “You know what, if it was a real board of directors and the
VCs were bringing you these great ideas, you wouldn’t really have any choice
but to say yes. And you’d keep getting distracted to do their pet projects that
they dreamed up in the shower one night and they think might be a good idea,
and you just don’t think it’s a good idea.” You don’t really have the ability to say
no when you take those outside investments. It’s hard to tell your investors,
“Let me just go in my own direction.”
There are things that we do, boy, that I’m so thankful that I don’t have to
answer to anybody. I don’t think it’s possible to have private offices for developers
when you’re VC-funded, because it looks extravagant. I think that it’s worth
paying for in terms of the productivity you get. We spend an outrageous
amount of money on quality office space that other people don’t. That makes it
easier to recruit and makes us more productive, I believe. But I’ve heard from
people that it would be considered completely unacceptable by the average VC
to have private office space—because it’s considered an extravagance of a successful
company or something like that. And, you know, “Why aren’t you all in
the same room talking?”
I’ve had that argument whether it’s better to have private offices for developers.
I don’t want to have that argument anymore. I don’t want to have to try
to convince people anymore. Certain features—flying first class, Aeron chairs,
double monitors, the best computers that money can buy—these are things
which might be considered extravagant, but it’s nice just to be able to do things
the way that we believe they should be done, without having to have a big argument
educating other people as to why we know how to develop software and
they don’t.
Livingston: Is there any advice you would give a programmer who wanted to
start a startup who wants to avoid having to take any outside investment?
Spolsky: It’s totally possible. I would recommend that you create a weblog and
have millions of readers every month from around the world that read it. That’s
not really necessarily followable. Step two is a little bit hard. I think it’s Larry
Wall who used to have this saying about Perl that, “Well, if you don’t like it, just
make your own language and then make it popular.” That was his way of refuting
any and all complaints about the Perl syntax or whatever.
So the reason I’m saying this, even though it’s tongue-in-cheek, is that we
definitely got a lot of publicity—what a traditional company would call PR—
through Joel on Software. And that caused us to get an enormous number of
initial customers. After that, our products spread by word of mouth. Existing