education and “we’re going to have fun, we’re going to have the beach house
and a Ferrari.” We did lots of things for free—we had a foundation, we did programs
for high school kids, and we did a one-year intensive computer science
program for people who wanted to transition from being a poet or whatever
into being a programmer. So people thought of me as a hippie. In reality,
ArsDigita was my sixth company, and I knew how to make money, and I was the
investor.
So while I publicly had a persona...

you only got to drive the Ferrari for as long as you worked at the company. I
figured, “Well, programmers only stay in the job 4 years, 5 years tops. It takes
them 3 or 4 years to recruit their ten friends, they’d drive the car for a year or
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two, and then they’d want to go back to grad school or go work somewhere else;
they’ll quit and then the Ferrari would go back in the pool.” I had set it up so
it looked extravagant, but didn’t actually cost...

online community and e-commerce site. We had all these modules do different
things. We had two versions: one was in Java Server Pages, very straightforward,
JSP talking to the Oracle data model, and the other one was an AOLserver Tcl,
which is kind of an obscure web server used by America Online for most of
their web services—very efficient. That was what we had started with in 1995.
It was state of the art in ’95; today you could do just as well with Microsoft
Internet Information Server and Active Server Pages. Anyway, it...

solved this problem, so we’re not going to attack it either. Not until we have
infinite money. We’ll just leave it, and, if customers have to spend 2 weeks of
hard programming upgrading the server, then that’s the cost. So that was one of
the biggest things.
The second thing we didn’t like about it was that it wasn’t the full Java 2,
Enterprise Edition. At the time, some of these people thought that it would be
cool if they had multiple layers of Java in there. They said it was a little too...

had gotten rid of some of the senior people.
The question-and-answer forum, which was one of the most heavily used
parts of the site, was literally a thousand times slower than on the old system.
As far as upgrades, they said, “We’re going to have this abstraction layer, and
you’ll never have to actually interact with the database; you’ll just talk to this
abstraction layer.” Sure enough, the first time people tried to build a real system
for a customer list, they found that the abstractions weren’t the right ones,
and they had...