Joel on Software

2000/10/12

Every once in a while some venture capitalist feels a need to give you some money. Usually it's because he has a nasty business idea and he needs to bribe people to play along for a while.

For example, when Drugstore.com started up, they offered everyone $10 worth of free stuff. I used my $10 on Mach 3 razor blades, which last forever in the closet and are small and easy to store.

Now UrbanFetch is going out of business, and they're dumping all their inventory at bargain basement prices. This time I bought about $70 worth of Mach 3 razor blades, which last forever in the closet and are easy to store.

The thing about Mach 3 razor blades is that they're quite expensive, and never on sale. But when you find a stupid venture capitalist trying to give you stuff, if you can get him to give you Mach 3 razor blades, that's basically as good as cash (in small quantities).

Razor blades. The currency of the New Economy.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, enlightened project management software for bug tracking, Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop support easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.