David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Small teams are more fun.

If you ask almost anyone,

I'm sure Toby would say this too.

Even at his scale, the sheer enjoyment of building something is in the enjoyment of building it with a tiny team.

Now, you can have impact at a different scale when you have a huge company.

I fully recognize that and I see the appeal of it.

But in the actual building of things, it's always small teams.

Always.

Don't take venture capital.

Point number one.

I mean, that's been the answer for the longest time because the problem isn't just venture capital.

It's other people's money.

Once you take other people's money, completely understandably, they want a return and they would prefer to have the largest return possible because not them.

sitting in the code, not them getting the daily satisfaction out of building something, chiseling beautiful code poems out of the editor, right?

They don't get that satisfaction.

They get the satisfaction maybe of seeing something nice put into the world.

That's fair.

But they certainly also get a satisfaction of a higher return.

And there is this sense, certainly in venture capital, stated in venture capital, that the whole point of you taking the money is to get to a billion dollars or more.

Now, the path to that usually does go through running established playbooks.