I could be wrong, but I think this letter illustrates why why many of us are attracted to startups. This kind of esprit de corps, this sleeping under your desk and working around the clock doing everything you can to move the ball forward, this single-minded insanity that focuses 100% of your effort and will on building something amazing and changing the world forever. Is it probably just naive and idealistic and ridiculous? Yeah, it probably is. But I think at the end of the day, many of us just want to be that committed to something.
I apologize if I'm mistaken (I'm sure if I was right somebody would have also noticed this by now), but isn't this a letter to the shareholders of the company, telling them they need to help out, even relocating to their office for a month, as their full-time employees are already overloaded with work, and the company may go bankrupt in months?<p>This is a huge difference because the link isn't to a typical story about leadership telling their employees they need to work harder. It's in fact a different type of letter--one that appears to have been sent to shareholders who are not employees--that I don't think any of us have seen before.
While the Autodesk file makes for interesting reading, I'd find Walker's personal opinions a little more credible if there were more material from other sources.<p>I've always been bothered by his attitude that he made no mistakes in how he handled an interview with an analyst who subsequently smeared Autodesk, after it lost half its market value in one day - <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_99.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_99.html</a>
Trust me on this, you'll never get a completely "truthful" article out of a journalist.
Clearly this was an extreme case, but my advice applies even when the journalist is amicable and eager to please, even then your opinion/data/information will be mangled in some way, shape or form.
I know Ted Nelson, who was funded by John Walker (after an introduction at the secretive Hacker's conference) to the tune of $10 million for Xanadu. He's had problems getting funding for Zigzag, which is equally as innovative.