David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

And an individual writing something, on some parameter, what they do is worse.

Of course, it's worse when one person has to make something that a huge company have hundreds, if not thousands of developers that they can have work on that problem.

But in so many other parameters, that worseness is the value.

That less is the value.

In Getting Real, which we wrote back in 2006, we talk about this notion of less software.

When we first got started with Basecamp back in 2004, people would ask us all the time, aren't you petrified of Microsoft?

They have so many more resources.

They have so many more programmers.

What if they take a liking to your little niche here and they show up and they just throw a thousand programmers at the problem?

And my answer, perhaps partly because I was like 24, was first of all, no, no care in the world.

But the real answer was they're not going to produce the same thing.

You cannot produce the kind of software that Basecamp is with a team of a thousand people.

You will build the kind of software that a thousand people build.

And that's not the same thing at all.

So, so much of the main breakthrough is

in both end-user systems, but also in open-source systems, in fundamental systems.

They're done by individuals or very small teams.

Even all these classical histories of Apple has always been like, well, there's a big organization, but then you have the team that was actually working on the breakthrough.

It was four people.

It was eight people.