"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered."
In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a experience providing company.
Twitter is the refutation to pg's thesis. Despite their initial technical incompetence, they managed to attract a top-notch technical team because they managed to deliver a crawl-over-broken-glass experience (it's so compelling people are willing to crawl over broken glass to experience it, see also: craigslist, plentyoffish).
It was interesting attending the YC work at a startup day and seeing RethinkDB present. Their pitch, in not as many words was basically "Look, we're the only company here that is actually working on a problem that demands world-class engineers (in the non-debased sense of the term)". For most of the other startups, despite all their bluster, the technology platform they were using was commoditized and technology was not their differentiating factor.
I've talked to people who currently work at twitter who are pretty open that a large part of their job is paying down the technical debt from the early days. The engineers who were at twitter in the early days were by no means bad but it's pretty open within the company that they weren't "world class"
In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a experience providing company.
Twitter is the refutation to pg's thesis. Despite their initial technical incompetence, they managed to attract a top-notch technical team because they managed to deliver a crawl-over-broken-glass experience (it's so compelling people are willing to crawl over broken glass to experience it, see also: craigslist, plentyoffish).
It was interesting attending the YC work at a startup day and seeing RethinkDB present. Their pitch, in not as many words was basically "Look, we're the only company here that is actually working on a problem that demands world-class engineers (in the non-debased sense of the term)". For most of the other startups, despite all their bluster, the technology platform they were using was commoditized and technology was not their differentiating factor.