Re: Y Store now C++

To: address@hidden

Subject: Re: Y Store now C++

From: Paul Graham <address@hidden>

Date: 26 Feb 2003 14:13:48 -0000

Cc: address@hidden

Sender: address@hidden

Even if you have to rewrite the software in another language as part of selling the company, I'd still call that working. But I don't believe this is often a substantial obstacle. Companies buy startups because they're afraid their competitors will. If it looks like you're going to have the dominant market share, acquirers can overlook nearly anything; and if you don't, they don't want you at all. To the extent there is any discomfort about the language you used, you can often use the pointy-haired bosses' mistaken ideas against them. If they take as an axiom that "all languages are equivalent," (if this is true, btw, we're all wasting our time talking about language design on this list) they'll easily believe that it will be a trivial matter to port your code to some more boss-friendly language, and that the language your software is written in is thus no serious barrier to acquisition. I don't think I intentionally misled Yahoo (too much) on this point, but if I did it was for their own good. Many of the aspects of Y Store they've been able to change (the pricing, the test drive), they've messed up. But because they didn't dare touch the Editor itself, they haven't been able to spoil it. How many big companies can say five years after acquiring software from a startup that the software is just as good as it was under the startup? --pg --Daniel Weinreb wrote: > Paul Graham wrote: > > >Though you meant this as a joke, this is in a sense the > >key to success. A lot of startups are doing de facto > >product development for big companies. Because in > >the startup phase they don't yet have the big companies' > >pointy-haired bosses telling them what to do, they can > >use radically better technologies than they'd be allowed > >to if they already worked for the company that will later > >buy them. > > > In your case, it worked; Yahoo was willing to buy the code even though > it was > in what they (at least now) consider an exotic langauge. The last time I > was at > a company and tried to sell technology to another company, the biggest > problem > they had with the whole idea was that they didn't like the language that > it was in. > I have a friend (on this list) who wanted to sell his company's > technology, and he > and his co-workers decided to undetake a complete rewrite to put it into > a more > acceptable language. So the stragegy you're talking about only > sometimes works. > > >