David Heineimeier Hansson podcast on Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

Really good podcast in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series from Stanford here:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2334

It's David Heineimeier Hansson of 37 signals and Ruby on Rails fame, always good for an opinion and I think part of a company a lot of people would like to imitate one day, as in the best kind of flattery type of imitation.

Top bits for me:

Don't try to compete with Microsoft etc. on programming effort, marketting spend etc, they'll crush you. Especially on the marketting front this carrys some weight with me, I think some small companies try to imitat the big boys in this arena too much and don't make enough of what they have the big boys don't.

Don't take VC finding unless you actually need to build a factory in India or something. Having sat in a meeting to discuss how we'd spend a million dollars if we got it I know some companies are attracted to the VC capital without neccesarily thinking through what it is they actually need it for. Also, the risk of wasting your time on something which isn't going to be profitable is increased, fail fast and fail often as they say.

All his stuff about building a scalable company, not as in one which can scale to tonnes of employees, but one which scales the cash coming in without scaling up the employee numbers. Very nice idea to try and focus on, keeping this in mind is I guess how you keep a lean startup lean as it ages and evolves.