Call Me Fishmeal.: Success, and Farming vs. Mining

If you farm, you’ll have to purchase seed up-front, and work on it for a season before you see any profits. And every season you’ll plow most the profits (literally) back into the land and salaries and your mortgage. You husband the soil to ensure that it’ll keep providing for you for years and years. If you’re lucky, and if you do a good job, you’ll gather a following, sales will increase, and eventually you may make a tidy living. But every season, no matter how rich you get, you’re going to be back out there, breaking your back and working with the soil. When you finally retire, if you’ve done a good job, the soil is as good as when you first got it, and your farm will live on.

Or, you could mine; you’ll need some initial money to lease mining equipment, and to hire some people to work the mine. Then, bam: profit. You’re making money. You tear a giant hole in the ground and eke every last bit of metal out as quickly as possible; there’s nothing to preserve, there’s no soil to keep in condition. You’ll make a big score, then the land will be spent, and you move on, leaving an unusable crater.

As metaphor for building a software company, but it applies to everything.

I think he misses/glosses over some points about the stock market (and more importantly misses a more substantial critique on the way things are done and why incentives are wrong), and of course there are a few companies combining IPOs and high-priced stock with actually making good stuff, but the overall perspective and point about how things should be i heartily endorse.

Indeed, a founding principle of the Agaric collective is that selling out is impossible, and part of open source free software as a business philosophy is that we are paid for work and not lock-in.