The CEO of Meebo, Seth Stern­berg, started a TechCrunch series focus­ing on the deci­sions a young entre­pre­neur needs to make. His first post, “From Noth­ing To Some­thing. How To Get There” rec­om­mends you focus on build­ing a prod­uct and for­get about VC:

“At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other peo­ple had the exact same idea. There was just some­thing in the envi­ron­ment that made it the right time for folks to think that one up. The race has already begun! Who’s going to exe­cute first? Who’s going to exe­cute best? If you want to waste nine months try­ing to raise VC money for that idea, great. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see some­one else put out that same prod­uct you’re pitch­ing me right now. Like I said, for­get every­thing else and just get your prod­uct out the door. Now.”

This week­end I also redis­cov­ered Mar­tin Kleppmann’s excel­lent blog Yes/No/Cancel. First it was build­ing sim­ple REST APIs in Scala but felt strangely val­i­dated read­ing The Python Para­dox is now the Scala Para­dox. He uses an argu­ment from Paul Gra­ham that:

“…a com­pany can hire smarter pro­gram­mers if it chooses to write its code in a “com­par­a­tively eso­teric” pro­gram­ming language”

While Paul Gra­ham was argu­ing about Python at the time, Klepp­mann argues that Scala is this year’s black and has had great suc­cess using it to build parts of Go Test It:

“…but pro­vided the tech­nol­ogy is suit­able and won’t increase your costs dis­pro­por­tion­ately, why not do some­thing fash­ion­able and adven­tur­ous? In an innovation-based tech­nol­ogy busi­ness, the qual­ity of your devel­op­ers is key. Invest­ments into things which make your good devel­op­ers happy will pay off handsomely.”

I’m with Seth that every minute I’m not work­ing on my ideas some­one else is, but I strug­gle with what risks I add by using tech that is new to me. Is it worth adding a few months to get a solid archi­tec­ture in place as opposed to throw­ing together a shell that’s mostly throwaway? When you have no prod­uct you can only con­sider the oppor­tu­nity cost.

In the end none of it mat­ters if I don’t have a work­ing pro­to­type, but this does con­tinue to occupy me… espe­cially as I wait on GWT to com­pile with Snow Leop­ard fixes.