Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky at Startup School 2012

Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor of Fog Creek Software differentiate between "get big fast" strategies for network-effect markets and organic growth models for saturated sectors, using their own ventures to illustrate the viability of each path. While Fog Creek initially survived the dot-com crash through conservative bootstrapping and consulting revenue before launching the rapid-scale Stack Overflow, the company recently applied the former model to the "land grab" of Trello by funding expansion internally with employee-bonus contributions. Ultimately, Spolsky argues that attempting to mix these conflicting models leads to failure, whereas choosing the appropriate strategy based on market conditions offers either a low-probability chance of a billion-dollar valuation or a high-probability route to stable, multi-million dollar profitability.