Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky explains how Fog Creek grew slowly by funding itself through consulting and software sales, while Stack Overflow grew quickly through network effects and later raised venture capital. He compares organic-growth businesses, which need a product valuable to a single customer and must break even early, with get-big-fast businesses, which can use investment to capture a market. He describes how Fog Creek’s products, especially FogBugz, funded its operations and helped support Trello. His central advice is to choose a growth model suited to the market and commit to it.