It's surprisingly rare for me to get emails with suggestions for posts, but since posting last week about my startup, I've gotten several requests for a post about programming. Good idea-I should have thought of this before.
Now is a particularly good time to talk about programming, because now is a particularly good time to start a tech business. Every two weeks I go to Startup Poker, where I play poker with a bunch of startup employees and owners. We don't talk about startups all that much, but when we do, a recurring theme is this: there has never been an easier time to start a startup.
The process of starting up a tech company has almost become standardized: two founders join together with an idea, they start building it, take funding, and change the idea along the way as necessary. Amongst the two founders, there are only two configurations that you'll see: either both are "technical" or one is "technical". Technical meaning that they can program and will actually build the product.
When I was a kid, my parents would tell me to do something reasonable like clean my room. I'd probably do it, or at least make a token effort. Sometimes I wouldn't do it, and my mom would do it for me. Or maybe I'd be out at school and she'd be sick of me having a messy room, so she'd just clean it without asking me to do it first. In school I'd be assigned stuff to do. Usually I'd do it, but when I didn't, there weren't really any consequences. I'd get worse grades, but the impact of one assignment on a grade always seemed so tiny, and I never really cared about grades beyond not getting in trouble with my parents.
I got used to the idea that if I was supposed to do something, but didn't do it, it didn't really matter. Maybe someone else would just do it for me, or maybe the problem would just go away. There are probably a million different reasons that people procrastinate, but this was probably the biggest one for me. It wasn't that I thought that I would prefer to do something later-- it's that I sort of subconsciously thought that if I didn't do it now, maybe I'd never have to do it.
