Although we couldn't ship features as fast as my friend's startup, in the end we outlasted them all while making more money. I remember him making him no money, their product spent over two years with no pathway to profitability in ever in sight.

Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think I thought right away that their startup had no chance, but I thought it was good on them for giving it a try. You need to swing the bat sometimes. Can't just take the easy route out. If we all took the easy route like myself then we would have quite the boring world. Anyways it wasn't so bad that he took that swing. He was married to a doctor and they hadn't had kids yet. Given his circumstance founding a startup, whether successful or not,  was probably one of the best things to do.

In a way I'm kind of jealous. Not just right now, while thinking back at it, but even during. I remember being keenly aware that I was jealous that his team was using a monolithic

MVC

framework to write features in the way I thought was best (simplest) but I had never considered any jealousy regarding him taking a shot at founding his own startup while I was running a boring run of the mill software 

consultancy

. I don't think I was mature enough at the time to entertain such emotions. I can today but not then. Then I probably made myself feel better by downplaying the chances of success his startup had. Making up stories and replaying them in my head of how they were doing the wrong thing while I was doing something smarter or better.

We seem to run through our lives doing this more than we'd like to admit.