[h0h0h0]

I don't understand how Jacques survived the 12 hour days for weeks on end? I go pretty stir-crazy when I work a 60 hour week and it's why I haven't started a startup. I'm not sure I would have it in me. Kudos.

I'm also wondering why he stuck around so long. To me the writing was on the wall that it wasn't going to work!

[jacquesm]

It was closer to two years all together. And on plenty of days more than 12 hours. But I always was a pretty high energy person.

This is not something you should give me 'kudos' for, it's just something I was born with, though I feel as I'm getting older that I'm definitely slowing down.

The problem with quitting was that there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel all the time, only then when you almost got there the tunnel got longer.

And in the end, it did work. The software ended up working as advertised (ok, you can keep adding features to something like that forever, just like any other cad program) and it ended up as the basis of a reasonably successful company that is still in business over two decades later.

It's just that to do this sort of thing properly the first time out of the gate you'd need at a minimum 3 people, a domain expert (which 'Fred' definitely wasn't) driving the specification, a UI guy and a low level person.

If it had been like that I could have saved literally months of rework based on the assumptions that were fed in to the process early on as 'immutable', only then to be changed at a later date anyway.