David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Well they were a web company. For the first time in history, you actually could. All these companies with big client Microsoft would ship every three years with a service pack once a year. It’s a whole new era where all you have to do is upload some new PHP code to the FTP server and then boom the application behaves differently the next time someone pulls down the page. It’s the new technology era of interpreted languages running on web servers in a browser now that products are in browsers meant you could architect your company differently and ship differently. Yes, and when Adam becomes officially the CTO, he’s actually we should probably just ship multiple times a day. We should just be shipping all the time. Also we should probably start recruiting a real top tier engineering team. Because remember, it’s still nuclear winter for startups. Great tech talent is available. They start going and recruiting like really, really top tier engineering hires, and it’s a pretty compelling offer. We’ve got real revenue from this Microsoft partnership. We’re the best funded startup in the valley. People want to buy us for a billion dollars, we turn them down. That’s all the financial reasons to take it. For a lot of people too, it was such a breath of fresh air. I think Facebook was potentially maybe the first company, first startup to have an open office plan. Just everything about how they ran the company was different. It was the prototypical startup. To this day, early Facebook is still what most startup culture is aspiring to be. I think often without knowing it, everything from the posters on the walls with your mantras and your values to almost having an employment brand that you really care about, cultivating to the idea of we’re having just as much fun together socially as we are working together. I think the modern startup culture, especially when you factor in the shipping everyday open office, why come in here, trains companies to become like Facebook was?…

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