The Case for the Fat Startup. [This blog post was originally published on All Things Digital on March 17, 2010.]
Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008 during which it advised them to “Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.”
(You can see the presentation here.) The presentation catalyzed a movement. On the one hand, it is a fact that capital invested is negatively correlated with returns in the venture capital industry. So what’s a start-up to do? Here is my central argument. What the hell do I know? Al Pacino couldn’t be no gangsta, DeNiro in ‘Casino’ he no gangstaWanna be, wanna see, wan’ get a shoveldig Tookie up n*&%^! At this point, some of you are asking yourselves, “What the hell does Ben know? Note that the Nasdaq Index is very highly correlated to the start-up funding environment. Lire et après ? Using the Rake Build Language. Rake is a build language, similar in purpose to make and ant.
Like make and ant it's a Domain Specific Language, unlike those two it's an internal DSL programmed in the Ruby language. In this article I introduce rake and describe some interesting things that came out of my use of rake to build this web site: dependency models, synthesized tasks, custom build routines and debugging the build script. I've been using Ruby extensively now for many years. I like its terse but powerful syntax, and its generally well-written libraries. A couple of years ago I converted much of my web site generation from XSLT to Ruby and have been utterly happy with that change. If you are a regular reader of mine, you'll not be surprised to know that my entire web site is built automatically. In my early days with Rake, I used it in a similar way to how I'd used ant. This is a somewhat skewed story.
Dependency Based Programming. « L’actif de la start-up est l’apprentissage qu’elle fait de ses fausses routes » XEnvoyer cet article par e-mail « L’actif de la start-up est l’apprentissage qu’elle fait de ses fausses routes »
