[ericssmith]

He keeps warning not to write thousands of lines before talking to customers (as you often hear from biased survivors). But it sounds like they didn't find PM fit by talking to customers. Rather they identified -- perhaps out of desperation and exhaustion -- 0.1% of the code they had written that they thought might be useful and threw it out there. The takeaway really seems to be write as much code as you can, if one-tenth of one percent is going to be the golden nugget. Also, I suspect that they were able to use that other code and the processes around it to capitalize on their good fortune.