The NFT Crash Was Predictable
NFTs crashed 95% from their 2021 peak. This was predictable from the start. Artificial scarcity of infinitely reproducible digital files was never going to hold value....
The Myth of Overnight Success
Every startup success story is a lie by omission. The media compresses years of grinding, pivots, and near-death experiences into a simple narrative. The 'overnight success' takes 7-10 years on averag...
The Shareware Model Nobody Remembers
Before SaaS and app stores, shareware let independent developers make money through an honor system. The model worked for decades and contains lessons about distribution, trust, and monetization that ...
Founder Ego Kills Startups Faster Than Bad Code
Startups die from ego before they die from competition. Pride that can't hear feedback, founders who can't fire themselves, and the delusion that vision equals execution. 45 years of watching it happe...
Programming Before Google: When You Had to Actually Know Things
Programming in the pre-internet era meant libraries, magazines, and BBSs. The struggle was the education - deep reading because you couldn't skim, memorization because lookup was expensive....
Technical Debt Isn't Debt - It's Rot
Debt implies payback. You won't. It compounds faster than interest. Every startup that says 'we'll clean it up after we raise' never does....
How 'Piracy' Actually Helped Technology Move Forward
Software piracy in the 80s and 90s built the networks, protocols, and communities that became legitimate tech infrastructure. BitTorrent, streaming, cloud storage - all have roots in the scene....
My First Computer
1977 was the year everything started. The Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET created personal computing. What it was like to be seven years old, wanting one desperately....
Debugging Before Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow launched in 2008. For the first thirty years of my career, 'Google the error message' wasn't an option. The debugging skills that era required are different from what developers learn t...
What Prodigy Taught Me About Walled Gardens
Prodigy invested $1 billion building walls that collapsed when the open internet arrived. The pattern has repeated with every major walled garden since....