David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I'm going to go off riding or annoy people on the internet or drive some race cars to do something else.

And then I can do the programming thing with full intensity again next year.

decision can you talk to the full saga of jj leaves the cloud yes leaving aws um saving money and i guess the case this person is making now is that we wasted our time optimizing a business that could have been 100 times bigger if we'd just gone for the moon and and for the moon includes venture capital but also other things includes not caring about cost

I think it's a bit of a muddy argument.

But if we just take it at its peak ideal, which I actually think is a reasonable point, is that you can get myopically focused on counting pennies when you should be focused on getting pounds, right?

Yeah.

I've optimized our spend on infrastructure by getting out of the cloud.

And that took some time.

And I could have taken that time and spend it on making more features that would attract more customers or spend even more time with AI or done other things.

Opportunity cost is real.

I'm not denying that.

I'm pushing back on the idea that for a company of our size,

Saving $2 million a year on our infrastructure bill, which is about somewhere between half to two thirds, goes directly to the bottom line, which means it's returned to Jason or I as owners and our employees, part of our profit sharing plan.

It's totally worth doing.

This idea that costs don't matter is a very Silicon Valley way of thinking that I, again, understand at the scale of something maybe.

But I also actually think it's

It's aesthetically unpleasing.

I find an inefficient business, as I find an inefficient program full of line noise, to just be a splinter in my brain.

I hate looking at an expense report and just seeing disproportionate waste.

And when I was looking at our spend at 37 Signals a while back, a few years back, I saw bills that did not pass my smell test.