David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

The scale seemed quirky.

And at some point, you can also fall in love with your own quirkiness to a degree that isn't actually healthy.

And I've certainly done that over time.

And we should have had someone count the beans a little more diligently a little earlier.

This was part of a...

blessing of just being wildly profitable and selling software that can have infinite margins, basically, that you kind of can get away with a bunch of stuff that you perhaps shouldn't.

What partially taught me this lesson was when we realized we had not been collecting sales tax.

In different US states where we had Nexus.

And it took us about two years and $5 million in settlements and cleanups to get out of that mess.

And after that, I went like, okay, fine, we can hire a finance person.

Okay.

And we now have a wonderful finance person, Ron, who actually ended up replacing something else we used to have.

We used to have a full-time data analytics person who would do all sorts of...

insight mining for why are people signing up for this thing?

We ran that for 10 years and realized, you know what?

If I can have either a data analytics person or an accountant, I'm picking the accountant.

Worse is better on adoption with technology a lot of times.

And I think it actually comes out of the same thing.

It comes out of the fact that many of the great breakthroughs are created by not even just tiny teams, but individuals.

Individuals writing something.