Damn that turtle is bad ass.

YES THIS IS HUGE TRY TO BE IN THE SAME CITY.

Context: I started my company in 2005 from Ann Arbor (which quickly became Chicago) with 2 partners in NYC. Here's what we learned:

* It is very hard to get funded if you're not all in one place. Also, my previous startup, from '99-'01, relocated everyone as soon as the A round closed.

* All-hands company meetings are very hard to do, because they take the form of interminable phone calls instead of lively back-and-forths.

* Software design debates rapidly turn into a game of telephone.

* It's much harder to guage the mood of the team; we lost 2 people because they were unhappy about stuff that might have been resolved had we caught it earlier.

* Solo founders in far-flung branch offices quickly feel out of the loop, which sets up a bunch of vicious cycles involving security, assertiveness, style, and communication.

We've made it work by growing through it, painfully; we now have so many people in just two offices that there's a cameraderie and common purpose (I'm dignifying it, yes). It's still more painful than it would be if we were all in one place. I haven't said this anywhere but here, but we'd have shipped 9 months ago (as opposed to weeks ago) if we were all together.

The company I worked for between startups --- Arbor Networks (a startup, but I didn't start it, and I was employee #40something) --- has a business office in Boston and engineering in A2. This, too, was a debacle. Engineering and management are "us vs. them" in the best of circumstances.

More points:

* No rent for office space is not necessarily a win. We could all work from home in Chicago. But having an office is great, partly for the same reason some people like wearing suits in NYC --- act the part, be the part, etc.

* People are often wrong about where they're most productive. If people are unproductive in an office culture, you may just have the wrong office culture. In Peopleware, Tom DeMarco lays out a great strategy for a skunkworks-style office to house a product team. Peopleware is excellent, read it!

* You're also missing out on the social aspect. How often can you all go out for dinners? When you have a shitty day and you're all pissed at each other, can you go out for a beer? (A teammate I yelled at once brought in a six pack at 2 in the afternoon, killing the work day and resolving the problem). Yesterday was my block party; everyone in my office showed up. How much cooler would it have been if the NYC crew was there too?

* Some really excellent players simply get lonely working from their home or in a tiny branch office. Some of them know it already and won't consider you. Some of them find out after they join and quit in the middle of a cycle. Obviously lots don't, but why cut your chances at all?

Well I'll be damned...

Is this a case of Arrington actually trying to make something happen instead of watching things happen?

I for one, am surprised. I am very happily eating crow. Not that anyone should care, but I have always disliked Arrington and the other bunch of observers because they think they're important when all they do is watch things happen and then write about it.

I hope this succeeds, and I hope they carry it through to completion. I will buy one of these for sure when it comes out.

FWIW, David and I worked together 7 time zones apart for 4 years or so before he finally came to Chicago in 2006.

David wrote the code for Basecamp in Copenhagen and I designed the interface in Chicago.

The distance was a big advantage to us. It helped us each focus on what we were good at without too much meddling. When you're close it's real easy to spend time worrying about stuff that doesn't matter. When you're further apart you tend to actually focus on the work since that's the only thing you can do.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but that was our experience.

Article would be improved by omission of tasteless stock photo.

He really is just describing a Nokia N810 tablet. When a reader suggested that, Arrington replied:

"yes, although we want to build it a lot cheaper and have a much bigger screen."

So, he expects to replicate the N810, but with a bigger screen and better price? How is he going to beat Nokia and still make a profit?

This has been the problem with AWS all along: Aggregate downtime at good hosting providers is measured in minutes, or even seconds, per year. Downtime at AWS has historically been measurable in days per year. This level of reliability puts it well into the bottom ranks of hosting providers. We're talking about the dregs of the industry here...the hosts who have a single cheap Cogent pipe running into a single cage of machines with no power backup and no backup pipe or infrastructure redundancy. This is the sole reason we don't recommend AWS to our customers, and why we don't use it ourselves for any vital services. We want to like it, and recommend it, and we have quite a bit of software that works with it, that we enjoy selling to people. But, the reliability just isn't there, and it has been a recurring problem since the service launched.

I liked this comment from/on the post:

Cory on July 21st, 2008 3:16 am

My Father is a carpenter and a hobby mechanic. My best shot and explaining how Lisp is different would be something like: Programming languages are collections of tools to make products. “Language A vs. Language B” is usually similar to “Saws and Hammers vs. Wrenches and Screwdrivers”. Lisp, however, is a collection of solid and useful tools that are amazingly made entirely out of Lego bricks. If you need a new tool, you can easily make one on the fly. You can even build configurable Lego machines that spit out custom Lego creations on demand. But, you have to be careful that you don’t end up with a shop full of oddities that even you don’t understand anymore.