Simple and Sloppy

Thanks to Brad Feld for pointing out Adam Bosworth's excellent talk at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing.

Adam points out the virtues of keeping web services simple and sloppy.  He points out that almost every attempt to create something with a lot of elegance, function, and structure has failed, and the simple things like HTML, RSS, XML, Google, etc have worked wonderfully on the Internet.

This is something we feel strongly about in our investments.  We'd much rather see entrepreneurs build something quickly, get it out there, and let the customers bang on it and evolve it.  The entrepreneurs who insist on over engineering their solutions inevitably end up with nothing to show for it.

Comments

[David]

Reminds me of Guy's "Don't worry, be crappy" segment in Rules for Revolutionaries. In my latest startup, everything went towards shipping product. When we brought on the business development manager, he was astounded. "you guys are actually shipping??" He was hooked. ;-) Now we're doing a small round of funding (small because we're shipping and REAL close to profitability, so the dollars will go towards sales/marketing), anyway, the VC's here in the midwest love us as a result.

[murray gray]

point taken, fred. =)

and with that in mind, we'll have some software for you to see *real soon now*.