Joel Spolsky at Startup School 2012
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recalls it as a well-liked talk from a respected founder, cited on startup ambition and on how few servers StackOverflow needed.
What it is
Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2016.
What Hacker News said
Recommends revorad · 2014-07 · on “Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M”
Joel is a class act. He spoke at YC's Startup School, which brings out his unique perspective - [this video]
Recommends mehrdada · 2016-11 · on “You Don’t Need a Master Plan, You Just Need to Start”
> Startups are overdosing on ambition these days > Not every billion dollar business starts with a billion dollar idea. Not everything unfundable by VCs is unworthy of doing. It's interesting the author is being a VC is understandably blinded by the bubble that never reports on such businesses. The vast majority of businesses created in the world, i.e. almost all small businesses, are exactly that. It's been done before and it's being done now, in large quantities. It's just so common that people don't feel writing medium posts about it and you don't tend to call them startups per se without the VC-funding and fast growth factor[1]. If you restrict the definition of a startup to this, then a
Cites aliakhtar · 2014-11 · on “TreeFrog: high-speed full-stack C++ framework for web applications”
Actually, performance is quite important for scalability. A lot of sites written in Ruby / PHP have big scalability pains if they get popular. Twitter had to be re-written from Ruby to Java. Facebook had to completely rewrite PHP's compiler to make it close to a compiled / statically typed language. Joel Spolsky mentioned how StackOverflow only needed 3 servers to run it for a really long time, because it was coded in a compiled language. [1] [1] [this video]