Rob Walling

Avoid escalating every small issue.

Even when something isn't your fault, as an entrepreneur, it's still your responsibility.

And so this whole mindset of just, if at all possible, the buck stops with me and I just don't have anyone else to, I can't find the foreman.

Foreman left to do something.

I have to just figure this out, even though it's kind of over my head.

And I think that's a mindset that has really helped me as an entrepreneur.

Lesson number seven is learning when I could and should cut corners and when I shouldn't.

So since I didn't really love working construction and I had written code when I was a kid, I went to the library and I learned Perl and I think a little bit of PHP and ASP 1.0 maybe, HTML, a little bit of JavaScript.

I just checked out books.

And in the early 2000s, I think it was in, it was the year 2000, I stopped working construction and I became a full-time software developer, a junior software developer.

And it was amazing.

I was working 40 plus hours a week writing production code.

We were basically like an agency, a consulting firm.

And we were building a lot.

We were in Sacramento and we were building a lot of apps for dot com.

So this was during the latter last year or two of the dot com boom.

And what I learned during this time was that sloppiness always comes back to bite you.

But there are times when you can and should cut corners on projects.

On the flip side, the other end of the spectrum is you can gold plate software.

There's a spectrum between being sloppy and being overbuilt.