[52358]

I did a software engineering internship at Overstock circa 2013-2014, and have a couple interesting stories myself.

However while an intern there I heard a story that Patrick Byrne locked a team of engineers in a room and didn't let them out until they implemented bitcoin payments into Overstock. Do you happen to know if this story is true? I remember at the time that made Overstock one of the first bigger mainstream websites to support Bitcoin.

[elliotec]

It's not precisely true but that story comes from him and it's not too far off.

He loved talking about "throwing a bunch of engineers in a room for a couple days and shoving pizza under the door periodically" for that implementation, and they basically did do that, but it was nothing more intense than a normal crunch time overnighter or like a hackathon, and of course they could've gone home if they wanted to. I knew them and most of them were pretty stoked on the project so they kinda wanted to do that anyway, and got a hell of a bonus for it too (and promotions, lots of them).