Joel Spolsky founded...
Joel Spolsky founded Fog Creek Software with his
friend Michael Pryor in 2000. They didn’t have a
specific product in mind, but were motivated to start
the kind of software company where they would want
to work—one where programmers were the stars.
Around the same time, Spolsky began writing
Joel on Software—now one of the most widely read
programming blogs—to share his thoughts about
software development, management, business, and
the Internet. Joel on Software was one of the first
examples of a now common (though rarely achievable)
strategy for software startups: create a popular blog to get attention.
With its popular software, including FogBugz and Fog Creek Copilot, Fog
Creek Software has doubled its sales every year, even during the post-Bubble
meltdown. The company never took any outside investment, and continues to
operate as a profitable, privately held company.
Livingston: How you did you come up with the idea? How did Fog Creek
Software get started?
Spolsky: There was no idea, in the sense that the only thing I thought was,
“There’s a bunch of people out there doing certain types of things and they
seem to be pretty incompetent, but they’re getting huge valuations. Surely if I
did those same things, knowing that I am less incompetent—merely semiincompetent
as opposed to extremely incompetent—I should be able to achieve
at least their level of success.”
There was a period in the late ’90s when starting companies was just a slamdunk,
no-brainer kind of thing. The people that were going public with
$100 million valuations were punk kids [who] just graduated from college and
knew nothing about anything. There were some really bad implementations of
very pedestrian ideas, and we thought we could do a lot better.
Probably the key inspiration—what actually made me take the leap into
starting Fog Creek—was Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita, who had a particular
business plan that seemed to be working at the time. In the long run, it didn’t
work, because they took venture capital for a consulting business and the consulting
market disappeared. But we looked at ArsDigita and said, “Wow!
They’re doing all this great stuff. But there are a couple of things that I would
do differently.” They had this weird, religious fear of everything Microsoft,
which I thought came from something of a position of ignorance. I don’t want
to say that Microsoft is great, but they said, “We are successful because we don’t
use Microsoft technology.” I thought they were just kind of randomly being
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