[prayag]

Dave's dilemma is far too familier to a lot of people in the tech scene in general, and bay area in particular. Bay area attracts the brightest minds from across the globe. All of them have been at the top of their high school classes. They have all been told from a very young age that they are destined to doing something great in life. They not only expect themselves to do better than themselves but pretty much demand it.

But when you have so many smart people trying to be more successful than their peers the definition of success changes. The bar rises and just building and selling a successful company doesn't seem good enough. You have to start the next Facebook, or the next Twitter.

IMHO, the best measure of success is not absolutes but a relative one. Compare your current self with your self from 2 years ago and ask if you are a better, more successful person.

By that measure Dave has done exceptionally well in the past few years.

[paraschopra]

Even comparing your present self to your past self is fraught with numerous biases. Humans have imperfect memories, so they only remember most interesting events from the past. Based on the few remembered details and a vague sensation of your self 2 years back, you would construct a full detailed description and compare it to your present self. But you forget that the past self that you have constructed is influenced a lot by your experiences in these past 2 years. Your past self really wasn't what you think it is.

You cannot accurately compare yourself over a time period. Moreover, on which dimensions are you going to compare? Say if I had a successful software company, but I give it up and move to Paris to become a mediocre painter, a vocation I'm currently enjoying a lot (but can't say if I keep enjoying it forever), have I made a good or a bad decision? Have I "progressed" in life or not?

Key should be to not overanalyze life, but rather simply live it as if it is not that important (in face of death, it isn't). Life should not be obsessively optimized. You can spend your whole life analyzing what you have done and still find yourself dissatisfied.

[prayag]

>Even comparing your present self to your past self is fraught with numerous biases.

This is definitely true. But you probably have a better idea of how successful/happy you were 2 years ago than your peers right now.

>Moreover, on which dimensions are you going to compare

Yes the dimensions have to be defined. If you wanted to be more creative or wanted to live abroad (assuming you are not from France), then you have progressed in life. But if you wanted to write more software than this is a regression.

>Key should be to not overanalyze life, but rather simply live it as if it is not that important.

Different strokes. You don't have to. But if you ever ask a question to yourself about whether you are successful or not, or happy or not you might want to measure somethings. I don't think it's a bad idea to look back once in a while and see where you have come to in life.

[einhverfr]

Exactly.

As I have been doing a lot more financial planning I have started to second-guess whether I want to look for funding in the Valley or bootstrap with a partner.

Yes, I think we can be a billion dollar company in 20 years or less with a couple million in investment. Yes, I think we could bring open source ERP into the mainstream.

However we aren't in the hot areas of the day. We are entering a market which is dominated by an increasingly small number of vendors (which we see as an opportunity). And according to my model, if we are willing to make a lot less on the first three years, we may be able to reach the billion dollar mark at most 10 years later, and we could do this without losing the freedom of operation--- without pressure to be acquired or go public.

So the delimma here is pitching ERP to VC's for money we might not really need that badly, in the hopes that taking money will get us there faster and build new connections, or going on our own.

We aren't going to be the next Facebook. We do however expect to become as big as RedHat, perhaps significantly bigger.

I don't know what we will do. It will depend on discussions with others on the team yet.

I do know though that the decision has become harder than it was before.

[Tichy]

20 years - the world wide web was invented just 22 years ago. In 20 years the world could be completely different from today. How do you even try to predict being a billion dollar company in 20 years?

[einhverfr]

The world will always need business process management software. If you provide something flexible, you can adapt to new technologies and opportunities.

But the basic overview of business process management software hasn't really changed as much as we might want to think. Even mobile devices have been around this area for most, possibly even all, of the last twenty years though they used to be a lot simpler.

As far as maximum size, I look to the businesses that dominate today and figure on a significant fraction of that size. If most businesses are 2-4 billion dollars a year in this space, if we can compete we should be able to reach a billion dollars.

Moreover in your question I think you are assuming that with changes, old opportunities go away. So I am wondering: what economic opportunities have died off as a result of the rise in the web?

[Tichy]

I just see that some billion dollar companies that got big through the web or computing are already going downhill again. For example Yahoo and Nokia (not sure about Microsoft).

For business management, off the top of the head I would ask: what devices will be used to run it in the future? Will desktop software still exist? Will everything be in the cloud? How will data enter the system?

One scary thing about the internet is that for a lot of things, a single company can cater to the whole world. That eliminates a lot of opportunities and competition.

[einhverfr]

There are changes coming. Nobody can dispute that. However, in a lot of cases, desktop software is not going to go away, at least for some definition of desktop software. A standard keyboard and screen interface is just too efficient for a lot of things. You aren't going to select, review, and adjust, and approve payment of 5000 invoices on your iPhone, and really, that's pushing the limit of stateless web interfaces too. You could have something like node.js or the like, but state really has to be handled or else you end up with major performance limitations.

Data entry devices however will become more diverse. There is no question about that. It used to be you had store-and-upload portable data terminals and desktop computers. Now you have both of those, plus the possibility of higher-end PDT's with real-time connectivity running embedded Windows, or the like (there is a real market here I think for Android-based PDTs but I haven't seen any on the market yet). These days, a PDT is kind of like a PDA, but typically more robust/rugged and often with additional industrial I/O capabilities, such as an RS-232 port which connects to undecoded laser barcode scanners. Doing this sort of thing on your phone isn't there yet. With a laser scanner, one can scan barcodes and take inventory fast, with barcode software on an android phone, your light limitations and low speed of processing make this problematic.

However, now we are seeing phones be used for some things. A worker may show up to a construction site and start entering time and material cards on his/her phone.

So what we see here is that each development is bringing diversity. The older layers don't really go away as much as one might think--- you can still buy PDT's which only store data to upload over a serial port and have digital LCD monochrome displays.....

Anyway our approach is to loosely couple the parts which will change only slowly (accounting logic) with the user interface which will be web- and desktop- based. Providing web-services and discoverable db interfaces makes integrating other devices easy.

We made these decisions for reasons other than being future-proof but that they help there is a nice bonus.

[einhverfr]

One more thought about old layers.

It has only really been about five years ago that we could get rid of terminal-based access (as in a virtual tty) to point of sales. A lot of people demanded something simple, and highly optimised for rapid data entry. The nice thing about a text-mode display is there is no temptation to take your hands off the kb and move to a mouse. KB and barcode scanner are all you need.

Now we have a web-based interface with a fair bit of automation, but we have to have a trackball in retail environments. However we make sure there are keyboard shortcuts to all the right things and that people are trained on these.

Of other businesses I know of, the last ones moved from text-only POS programs to graphical ones really only two to three years ago.

So things change remarkably slowly. The challenge is to accommodate a flexible workplace.

The web works for many things but for POS software, it is rather sub-optimal. Controlling serial port pole displays from a web page is a bit kludgy....