Just ten lines of code?

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson spoke very well about how foolish it was to judge the value of a startup, based only on the technical complexity of the project. He says that among many geeks a scornful attitude towards a project is often found, if it is technologically simple. They say: "Yes, this is only 10 lines of code, I will do this in one day" (or, alternatively, "yes, I did this five years ago"). This is a huge misconception, because the lion’s share of the cost of the project is not the number of lines of code, but the audience of the project. To gather an audience is the task of a startup.

Fred Wilson published his reasoning in the development of the flame regarding yesterday's news about investing in the Bit.ly link-reduction service, which was valued at $ 8 million. Flame-geeks insisted that such a simple service could not be worth such a lot of money. Actually, such comments were even on Habré, and many support this opinion, although it is completely meaningless, because copying the same code in your service does not do anything if you cannot build the same audience.

In fact, the re-evaluation of the significance of the code by techies falls into the same category of misconceptions as the opinion of content owners, who overestimate the importance of exclusive and unique content. Programmers overestimate code, authors overestimate content. If I may say so, these are purely professional delusions.
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via Techdirt