Money and happiness

`5:53:03`

— As the king of the Rails kingdom, has the power gotten to your head over the years? — I'm sure it has. I mean, who wouldn't? — Do you pace around in your chamber angry? — I do occasionally. And I do marvel at both what's been built, what's been possible. Over a million applications have been made with Ruby on Rails by one estimate that I've seen, businesses like Shopify and GitHub and a million others have been built on top of something that I started. That's very gratifying. But you really have to be careful not to smell your own exhaust too much. And you have to be just as careful not to listen too much to the haters and not to listen too much to the super fans either that you assess the value and the sort of principles of what you're working towards on its own merits, on your own scoreboard. I try to block that out and then just go, well I'm working on Rails because I love to write Ruby.

`5:54:06`

I love to use Ruby to make web applications. That's my north star. And I'll continue to do that and I'll continue to share all of the open source gifts that I uncover along the ways, and that's it. That's enough too. I don't have to get all of it out of it. This is sometimes just as with the guy who thought I'd given up on being Jira or something, instead of doing Basecamp, there are people over the years who've asked like, why didn't you charge for Rails? Like, don't you know how much money have been made off Rails? If we just look at something like Shopify, it's worth billions of dollars. I'm not a billionaire and so freaking what? I got more than enough. I got plenty of my share. I will say though, I'm also introspective enough to realize that if it hadn't panned out as well as it did for me on my own business, maybe I would've been more tempted. Maybe if you see other people build huge successful companies off the back of your work

`5:55:07`

and you really don't have a pot to pissed in, you might be tempted to get a little upset about that. I've seen that in the Rails world as well, where there are people who contributed substantial bodies of work and then got really miffed when they didn't feel like they got enough back. I was fortunate enough that the business that Jason and I built with Ruby on Rails was as successful as it was. And I made the money I needed to make that I didn't need to chase the rest of it. — But we should also just make explicit that many people in your position chase the money. It's not that difficult to chase. Basically you turned away money. You made a lot of decisions that just turned away money. — Maybe, I also think of this example with Matt. He probably thought there was easy money for the taking. And it wasn't so easy, was it? It looked like low hanging dollar bills and they turned out to be some really sour grapes.

`5:56:07`

It turned out he probably destroyed vast sums of money by undermining the whole WordPress trust and the ecosystem and putting question marks in the heads of folks who would choose to use WordPress or something else going forward. So I often think when people think like, you left money on the table. First of all, so what? I don't have to have all the money. But second of all, maybe the money wasn't on the table at all. — And maybe the cost. Even if you got the money, maybe the cost in other ways, like we've talked about, would outweigh all the money that you could have possibly gotten. Meaning like I think you said that the thing that makes you happy is flow and tranquility. Those two things. Beautifully, really beautifully put. And it, you know, gaining money might assign to you responsibility of running a larger thing that takes away the flow that you gain from being... fundamentally for you