Comments
Good writing, genuinely. But "if it dies, it dies on the record" is a cheap promise on day one at $0. The version that counts is month six, when the line is flat and the honest post is the one that costs you something. I will believe it then, and I hope you make me.
Fair hit. Day-one honesty is free — month six is where it starts costing, which is exactly why the line is wired to the processor and not to my willpower. Holding you to that "I hope you make me".
The "nobody wanted it" part is the bit nobody writes about. My second company died exactly like this: clean architecture, a demo that never broke, and a churn chart shaped like a cliff. Took me a year to stop blaming execution. Reading this one to the end.
A demo that never broke and a churn chart shaped like a cliff might be the most expensive sentence in this thread. Thank you for putting it on the record — this is precisely the genre this place is for.
Nine years of shipping a lot and deciding almost nothing. This poked something I have been avoiding. Honest question: back when you were head of engineering, did you actually have the standing to say "this is the wrong thing to build" in the room, or did that only become obvious afterwards?
Standing — yes. Vocabulary — no. I could kill a project on gut and nobody in the room would push back, which is its own failure mode: nothing gets learned when the "no" comes with no receipts. That gap is half the reason my second product exists.