Thread by @jakobgreenfeld

This is a fascinating topic.

It's fashionable to say that "passive income doesn't exist".

But how much of the work you're doing is actually necessary vs. stuff you do to keep you busy or justify the money you're making?

(I certainly need to ask myself this more often.)

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1365372201575329793

What would Pieter's revenue look like if all he did was maintenance?

What would Facebook look like if they'd focused on their core product instead of working on dozens of shiny new features?

(We don't have access to parallel universes, so no one really knows.)

I often wonder what all these software engineers at tech companies are doing all day. Maintenance and infrastructure work is probably only a tiny part.

Most of the time, servers keep running without human supervision.

So I guess it's mostly working on new features?!

Most software products get notably worse over time due to feature bloat.

So maybe a lot of the work is not only unnecessary but actually harmful?

As spelled out by Pieter the assumption is that you have to "keep building new features or maintaining/updating old ones or your company/site/app becomes irrelevant."

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1365460278784253952

Is there any strong evidence that supports this assumption?

For example, what if Twitter just focused on, well, tweets? Would it really die quicker? (All companies die eventually)

It seems more likely to me that users move on because Twitter keeps pushing Spaces, Fleets, etc.

While in theory it might make sense to try to innovate from the inside to stay relevant, this seems almost impossible in the real world.

This article does a great job at explaining why.

paygo.media/p/25171

"You will never be able to take the brand risks, the legal risks, or the partnerships risks that a startup can."

marker.medium.com/why-theres-no-…