The tech graveyard is full of overworked, tired, run-down, exhausted people who put in more hours than their bodies could handle. I run into people all the time who are putting in ridiculous hours and getting no where.

Hours don't make it. Good choices, the right focus, and intelligent decisions over a long period of time make it.

Jason C's point about practice is absolutely right though. But practice doesn't equal long hours. Practice equals practice. 3 hours of focused practice on the right thing is far better than 6 hours of practicing the wrong thing. Practice quantity isn't the secret, it's practice quality.

Here's a related post I wrote on "Making money takes practice like playing the piano takes practice":

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1985-making-money-takes-pract...

Cappuccino is in many ways more revolutionary and the SC, as it completely throws out any notion of dealing with HTML and CSS. By completely abstracting the presentation some things become easier, but some things become impossible (for example: they cappuccino devs haven't implemented all of CGGraphics, and that makes some things that are trivial in CSS, like rounding the corners of an image, effectively impossible). With SC you're working with HTML and CSS, though most of the HTML is generated by JS. I found the latter approach more flexible, especially if you can target CSS3-supporting browsers.

Both are based on cocoa, though Cappuccino takes its influences much more seriously. I love cocoa but I'm not terribly enamored with Obj-C syntax, so I don't really see why someone would want to take JS's superior syntax and replace it with Obj-C's, as cappuccino has done. Cappuccino also lacks a data store framework, while SC has a very good one.

Finally, SC uses native browser rendering as much as possible, which should make SC apps faster.

That said, I think Cappuccino has a lot of potential, and 280Atlas, a visual editor for cappuccino apps written in itself shows that. As it matures and the basically non-existent docs improve I think it will become increasingly worthwhile.

Patrick is trying to derive generic advice by formalizing his personal experiences. While it is useful to know what worked in his case, it is still just one project, an isolated experience.

I've been in a similar situation myself. I have sold a startup that settled me and my family for life, and things unfolded pretty much as I expected them to from the start to the acquisition. But the more I think about the whole experience now the more I am becoming convinced that there was a great deal of chance involved. And over the years I started describing my startup less in terms of how things should be done and more how they worked for me.

In other words, once you are lucky, twice - you are good. Once you are "twice", then it will be Insightful. Until then it's just Interesting. Feel free to disagree ;)

I believe that 37signals has legs to run for another 20 years. So selling for 10x todays revs seems like a poor, short-sighted investment to me.

I'd rather earn my way to "ridiculously wealthy" from profits than from some rich benefactor bestowing the wealth on me. To me that matters. I understand if others don't care, but I can afford to care.

In short, I think we'll get there. I think selling our company now would be a bad financial decision as well as a bad personal decision.

Building something from nothing and taking it to the moon has tremendous appeal. Letting some incumbent snatch up my rocket ship before it's even reached the stratosphere, just so I can build another one again with more bells and whistles doesn't make sense to me.

This study tells us that self-control might be a bit like a muscle, in that its use acutely makes it weaker. But do we chronically adapt to its use, and become stronger once the temporary fatigue has passed, as with so many other forms of stress? Intuitively, from my experience, we do, but it might be interesting to study. Either way, this possibility makes this study insufficient basis for advice to "use it sparingly."

The cheapest is to use a service like Paypale/FirstData/etc which are a bit more tricky to setup that the cheddary/spreedly but also offer recurrance charging. The catch is you'd have to keep track of the user data and management, and slighly more tricker to change providers .

Of course, one data point like this is useful if we look at all the other stories we get here on a daily basis.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Did they like ... just evolve or something? You'd think they'd have spiked before now and reached equilibrium.

Biological immortality no good if you get ate pretty soon.

The difference is between "I want to build something great that makes the world better" and "I want to build something that makes money." And really, when comparing 37signals to Mahalo, the mentality the leadership has is what inspires the community opinion and quality of product coming from those companies.

Note: I don't mean this as a all-too-common-on-HN cheap shot against Jason Calacanis. My point is that when people talk about Calacanis' camp, they talk about the quality of the business. When people talk about 37Signals, they talk about the quality of the product. Neither is wrong - they're just different.

Gruber was first to convince me that Apple didn't care about the business that Dell was in. Dell could have it. No margin.

Apple believed they built computers for the "elite" consumer who had taste or money or both and wanted a premium experience. They played there because that's where the margin is.

This situation (highlighted by iPhone vs. Android) is a stark departure for Apple, and it probably illustrates one of two things:

1. The competition is better, or 2. The switching costs for phones is much lower than for computers, and by costs I mean both money and the hassle of migrating data and applications.

Google is doing an amazing job on both fronts. If the iPhone didn't exist, Android would be the clear leader in this market. And when it comes to switching costs, Google is eradicating them: I use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Picasa. All work on both platforms very well. And I use Google Contacts as my primary rolodex.

I don't use Mobile Me because Google provides the equivalent for free (Google's services are probably better, really). Apple really doesn't have any hooks into me.

If Google can deliver a compelling alternative to iTunes, I could move tomorrow and the only costs I'd incur would be walking away from the $30 in Apps I've purchased.

Compare that to my trying to move from OS X to Windows.

Apple is rightly terrified of Google.

And it probably gets worse when the Chrome OS hits the market.

I love love love my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. But increasingly they are delivery vehicles for Google services. The irreplaceable part of that equation is Google, primarily because I'm not interested in Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Apple's alternatives.