You know what’s cool? Turning down twenty billion dollars(m.signalvnoise.com) |
You know what’s cool? Turning down twenty billion dollars(m.signalvnoise.com) |
There’s no technical barrier to building the same thing from scratch....
You can't take the ink out of the water, once it's in. When you sell your autonomy over a product whose properties give your life meaning, you pour the ink. Even more painful if that product then turns around and comes to represent values opposite yours.
Short of a buyback, which in this case is off the table, there's no sum that rectifies the regret of lost opportunity and the turning of the thing you built against you.
It's a hair callous DHH to be so direct about it, but as an observation, it seems sound – Acton appears to be a distraught billionaire when he might have been a sound-sleeping millionaire.
Perhaps that's not a trade worth making.
DHH often talks like bootstrapping and not selling is The One True Way™ but, financing trades equity for time: accelerating traction or traction-ability that can beat someone else to market (T2M). It's a slower path, but it's not rushed either. Pluses and minuses to both, and it depend on the category and circumstances