Achieving overnight success: Tom Preston-Werner

This reminded me of Chris Wanstrath's (GitHub Co-founder) talk/post where he said:<p><pre><code> But it wasn't an overnight eureka, and it wasn't intentional. I didn't just walk out of high school, pick up a Ruby book, meet Tom and PJ, then launch the site GitHub. Before GitHub came, in chronological order, Spyc, Ozimodo, my ozmm.org, tumblelog, ftpd.rb, Choice, Err the Blog, acts_as_textiled, Cheat!, acts_as_cached, Mofo, Subtlety, cache_fu, Sexy Migrations, Gibberish, nginx_config_generator, fixture scenarios builder, Sake, Ambition, and Facebox. And that's just the stuff I released. </code></pre> Source: <a href="https://gist.github.com/6443" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/6443</a><p>Discussion: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282158" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=282158</a>

I'm impressed with the premise of these articles and want to see more of them -- removing the glitz and glamour added by the media to entrepreneurial stories is an important service.<p>I must have been out of the loop -- I never knew that Tom Preston-Werner founded Gravatar[1] or that he worked at Powerset.<p>He mentioned in his blog post[2], as he was labelled a "flight risk", he was offered quite a sum of money to stay at Powerset/Microsoft. Money is quite sticky and to pull away from it requires both guts and determination. Even though I'm early in my career I've already come across the "flight risk" pot of gold and avoided it -- though as opposed to Tom I don't yet know if I made the right decision or not ;)<p>[1]: <a href="http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-selling-gravatar-to-automattic.html" rel="nofollow">http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-sel...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html" rel="nofollow">http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...</a>

The praise for Github bootstrapping to over 100 employees always strikes me as odd. I have the impression that using venture capital to accelerate a company marks a more modern approach to business, relative to the last ~30 years. Along these lines, Github's seeming delay in accepting venture capital signals to me that its core business plan strongly builds value without a "warp-tunnel" of venture capital, and that its current valuation comes from patience rather than a VC's gamble. Therefore, I see such public investments of VC more as a mark of impatience caused by a society that thrives so much on near-instant communication.<p>Is my impression off?

The site seems to be down due to traffic overload - here is a cached version:<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7f0lqf7g9s8J:joel.is/post/27696148578/achieving-overnight-success-tom-preston-werner" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7f0lqf7...</a>

Wow, never knew Tom created Gravatar. Really like these sort of posts but maybe the title of 'overnight success' is wrong? Great article though!

Why does this site always take 10 attempts to load?