> Most experienced devtool investors know that devtool markets usually come in threes: three parts of a stool that individually make sense, but collectively start jostling for the limited budget (and funding) available in their larger category (and will eventually be guided by their market to build or buy each others’ features in the process)
> For frontend/JAMstack devs, this was a three way battle between startups building metaframeworks, cloud infra, and content management systems, and various combinations of each. Arguably round 1 won by Nextjs/Vercel and Contentful. In data engineering, a similar battle ensued between data catalogs, semantic layers, and business intelligence, though we are still in very early days of category collapse. Even in fintech, you see Deel/Rippling/Ramp/Brex building each other’s features as fast as they can between the trio of contractor, payroll, and corporate spending products.
The Mythical Man Month comes to mind as one example.
There are also lots of business plans that promise outrageous returns on investment... sometime down the line. But at the end of the day your business is never going to be more valuable than the amount of money your customers give you minus operating costs.
Brook's Law - "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
This applies to all projects, not just software in my experience. Everyone thinks you just need to find the right expert who will magically just slot right into the team and process and hit the ground running. In practice, the people worth hiring take 4-6 weeks to get up to speed with the help of an existing project member, and the people not worth keeping start spewing out code that is ultimately neither helpful nor correct the moment they have access to your repo.
I took it to mean, don't fight beurocratic battles that you won't win.
For example, fighting RTO at Amazon. Jassy has made it one of his top priorities, and no matter how much I disagree with it, I'm not going to shift the needle
When I think of the laws of physics, I think of things which are reliable at some meaningful scale, and which can be used to make predictions about how things will go in the real world. So, to answer your question, no.
