#Opening Remarks

##jim dude: panel names as barometer

a couple years ago - tools, processes, banding together to provide standards and howts

this year - how to take those howtos and standards and build businesses / be successful using them

old: manu/ship/dist with in house creatives, new: creative with in-house manu/ship/disk

"curious inherit earth"

##Jim dude: The "how"

Our industry is more mature and we are more confident with our skills, so now we can talk about how to use those skills to acheive our goals / make phat loots

obscurity removes the fear of failure - start small, fail small

idea of "less" - constantly one-upping everyone is a bs cold war mentality. one-down instead of one-up. there's "plenty of complexity out there". value-add by adding simplicity.

###3 specific types of less that sound bad butt are good

• You want less time because the more time you have the more time you waste on overplanning, overthinking, writing too many docs and diagrams, living in the abstract world using your extra time.

• You want less money for reasons similar to above. You don't need tons of tech and redundancy - the only thing that money buys you these days is salaries. Spend your own money, you don't need vc when you are starting out, you will just have nice desks.

• Less software - avoid feature bloat, start from getting a few things right. You'll never run out of time to add stuff, but you can't take things away from your customers. Less software = manageable.

All this is about More Constraints. Seek them out. Embrace them.

##Q&A

"Eat your own dog food" - use it as you build it. More upfront planning is making decisions without information.

Lots of emphasis on importance of curious people and making decisions based on information you have, period. Quote from jason dude: "who gives a shit about someone's resume - are they good + motivated + curious? HIRED"

How do you make money? You charge for things you do. Ppl in this industry are afraid to charge people for some reason. People are happy to pay for quality.

LB is calling bullshit on this advice right now. He calls it the "worst advice ever"

The biggest complainers are the free / lowest tier customers. don't worry too much when ppl get upset - there will always be upset ppl. don't try to surf on the waves of public opinion

why does he hate functional specs? "they are about CYA and not making functional product." politics, "illusions of agreement"

their company doesn't accept jobs with RFPs longer than 2 pages - inflexibility + pain in the ass during dev process.

big webdev firm just walked out - i think they are irritated at the exact way they do biz being described as BS

"My name is Dustin, I work for Yahoo! and we write functional specs." *laughter* Calls it utopian. Reply: what is more utopian, thinking you can perfectly predict your product, or thinking you can figure it out with a small team and no spec? They write stories about their products. Hippies! "Someone like Yahoo has a lot of money so they can waste a lot of money"