Paul Graham argued convincingly that it’s more efficient to work for oneself, than to work for an employer. Even if a big company with 5000 programmers can create an impressively big product, which is hard to achieve for a small team of 3 developers, the average productivity of a member of the small team is probably much higher than the productivity of one member of the 5000 people team.
If the 5000 people team would be split in groups of 3 people, each group pursuing its own project, they would be working on 1600 projects.
So there is a tradeoff between the efficiency of small teams, and the ‘range’ of large teams.
The small team is efficient not only because of low communication overhead (the classical explanation), but also because each member identifies himself with the project. He works on his project, and the success of the project will be his success too.
I decided to quit my current job, as I want to work full-time on my own project. Of course, there is a lot of social pressure against being ‘un-employed’, without income. So I decided that I give myself a 6 month period, at the end of which I’ll evaluate the success of my project. If there’s no strong indication of success at that point, I’ll take upon a new job as an employee.
So now I have to run. I have to work quickly and efficiently, in order to show that my project can be a viable business. I’ve set milestones: 15 june for the first beta, and 1 july for the public release.
Once the project becomes public, one problem will be to build awareness around it. I decided to play ‘by the book’, so one of the first things I do is to start this blog. Here I’ll follow the project, from this early phase to either success or failure, in this 6 months interval.
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