In my experience, shipping fast wasn't the determining factor. It's always been to build tangible features for feedback purposes, and to focus development efforts on the core of what provides the value. Shipping fast is a side effect of maintaining this type of focus.
I can say I was initially not convinced this would take off. 175 pull requests later I've changed my tune. Now that we know there is a large talent pool interested in such a task, I wonder how much structure could be added before interest starts to subside. Surely something fantastic could come of this, but we just proved it needs a bit more direction.
I would personally love to see the "Alternative Approach" of using something along the lines of AngularJS to decouple an administrative API and a client side application. Arguably, with an appropriately designed API, this could be substantially more future-proof. Not to mention I think could end up being a big developer draw to the framework.
If you want to see how awesome it is, here's what you do. Purchase some tickets for a sporting event, and schedule a reservation for a restaurant afterwards. Make sure you purchase the tickets online and get the reservation through something like OpenTable so the confirmations get to your email.
To add to this point, I personally find the smaller the goal the better. The quicker I can get gratification the more willing I am to continue working at it.
If you have the freedom to make decisions, you also have the responsibility of being correct.
I'm not sure of the full intentions of the article nor your comment, but I think you may have missed a major point here. The article does not seem to argue that insanely smart people know all the right answers; instead it argues that insanely smart people have a pretty good idea when something is a bad idea, and will be the type of person who works out the right answer prior to pushing it live. That said, the other cases is covered as well...
Actually, mistakes are fine. They’re something you trade off for other variables like speed of iteration.
One problem I have with your second quote is that "speed of iteration," like intelligence of employees, is not in and of itself enough to make the result good for the product. The latter requires that the employees understand the target audience and their needs. The former requires that your iterations are moving in a direction that satisfies your target demographic, and if it doesn't, this isn't just not beneficial: Your speed of iteration becomes directly detrimental to the product.
That would be a qualified yes. As an example, the Gates Foundation has given a bit over a billion dollars to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis. Those three diseases are among the biggest causes of (relatively) easily preventable deaths. In terms of vaccines, research is being done to develop a vaccine for malaria (which causes about 1% of global deaths), but vaccination may not prove to be the most effective means of eradicating the disease. Things like antimalarial drugs and mosquito netting may be more cost-effective, and so malaria rates have dropped dramatically despite there not being a vaccine. There is a vaccine for Tuberculosis, but it's definitely not cost-effective. AIDS is no longer a death sentence, though no vaccine exists. So in terms of Malaria and AIDS, the foundation has been reasonably successful (tuberculosis is proving to be a rather more difficult problem).
So the Gates Foundation has contributed to improvements in health, though again, the contribution is fairly limited (as one would expect when talking about a fund with only $30 billion, which is a huge amount of money for an individual but pretty much insignificant on a global scale).
Correction: no FDA approved HIV vaccine exists, yet. However, HIV vaccines do exist and are in, or will soon be in, clinical trials. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will be proven to be safe and effective, but it's not unreasonable to imagine that one of the vaccines in the pipeline will prove to be.
The one thing I've always struggled with is translating design as described by a landing page to the design of specific components; Forms, modals, and other parts of the application. I would like to see combination screen shots of landing pages and these components to see how the designer was able to achieve this.
Maybe beyond the scope of "inspiration," but my two cents none-the-less.
