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Frame from Joel Spolsky at Startup School 2012 Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Joel Spolsky at Startup School 2012

18 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2014–2016 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recalls it as a well-liked talk from a respected founder, cited on startup ambition and on how few servers StackOverflow needed.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

“I remember Joel Spolsky talked at Startup School a few years back on this subject and he was spot on” (HN, 2016)

2 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@mehrdada Nov 2016 Recommends
on HN thread You Don’t Need a Master Plan, You Just Need to Start
Read more
> Startups are overdosing on ambition these days > Not every billion dollar business starts with a billion dollar idea. Not everything unfundable by VCs is unworthy of doing. It's interesting the author is being a VC is understandably blinded by the bubble that never reports on such businesses. The vast majority of businesses created in the world, i.e. almost all small businesses, are exactly that. It's been done before and it's being done now, in large quantities. It's just so common that people don't feel writing medium posts about it and you don't tend to call them startups per se without the VC-funding and fast growth factor[1]. If you restrict the definition of a startup to this, then almost by definition you need such ambitious visions. [1]: [link] I remember Joel Spolsky talked at Startup School a few years back on this subject and he was spot on[2]. [2]: [this video]
Spolsky's Startup School talk on startup ambition

Citations, criticism and jokes

@aliakhtar Nov 2014 Cites it
on HN thread TreeFrog: high-speed full-stack C++ framework for web applications
Actually, performance is quite important for scalability. A lot of sites written in Ruby / PHP have big scalability pains if they get popular. Twitter had to be re-written from Ruby to Java. Facebook had to completely rewrite PHP's compiler to make it close to a compiled / statically typed language. Joel Spolsky mentioned how StackOverflow only needed 3 servers to run it for a really long time, because it was coded in a compiled language. [1] [1] [this video]
Spolsky on StackOverflow running on few servers

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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