[smacktoward]

> Average startup's code is small, narrowly focused, has a (relatively) short lifespan, so it can be rewritten from scratch by 1 or 2 people.

But the reason those startups can be narrowly focused is because they can leverage huge volumes of working code written by others. In that sense, Joel's advice still holds, if you think of "rewrite" less as "throwing out your own code and starting over" as "throwing out memcache and writing your own caching layer/throwing out Postgres and writing your own database/etc." Which is a temptation that lots of startups fall victim to, rarely with a happy ending.