A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes.

For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these.

For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians, etc). Again, nothing wrong with any of these, and they may be a useful way of learning, or having ideas.

But for a very small number of people their ground state is much more focused. I've known people whose ground state is writing papers about physics or mathematics. And it's simply unbelievable what such people can get done in a year. (Note, mind you, that very few professional physicists or mathematicians fall into this category.)

I haven't founded or worked at a startup. My observation-from-the-outside is that founders often have to take on many different tasks. And I wonder how difficult that must make it for any of them to become a ground state task.

There is a lesson here about lawsuits, which will drain you of both money and peace of mind all at the same time. Sometimes you can't turn the other cheek, much as you would like to do so, and have no choice but to fight. Having the guts to stand up for yourself (or for your company) is in itself a virtue and there are times when it is best not to walk away. Unless you are in such a spot, though, always consider that the engagement will cost you dearly in just the ways pointed out in this fine essay - it will consume your waking thoughts and may even pop up in your dreams (or nightmares) (and it will cost lots of money, enough to sink most startups as a matter of course). Therefore, when it comes to lawsuits, use your best judgment but always count the cost before proceeding.

Actually there was a paragraph about this in the essay that I cut:

    The Nile Perch quality of disputes may help explain why large
    organizations are so unproductive.  The size of large organizations
    insulates them from the forces that keep smaller ones in line.
    Questions tend to be decided instead by political battles, and such
    disputes have a terrible cost because they push other ideas out of
    all the participants' heads.  Politics is like an infectious disease,
    because political schemers suck up not just their own attention,
    but also that of all the people in their way, who might otherwise
    have been thinking about other things.

Ouch.

I came to stackoverflow from search engine multiple times while searching for solutions to my problems. I was pleasantly surprised how fast I could find question that was asked and after confirming that the asker has similar problem to mine how fast I could browse through responses. Also I could get to know reservations other user had to responses (stated in comments to those responses). I shouldn't probably be surprised by my amazement because the thing that recurrently cropped up in my search result in old days was experts-exchange.

After multiple visits I finally got curious what is that site that helps me so often and I clicked link in the orange banner on the top that drew my attention. Up to this moment the only parts of the page that I've noticed were, questions, answers, comments and banner on the top.

After I registered and answered few questions I picked tags that interest me. They are visible on the right. Tags are for answerers not for askers. Tags visible to unregistered users are just cool unimportant bonus info similar to pageviews and they are placed in the bottom right when nobody even looks if he's not bored and exploring.

There are maybe some features that are not necessary, and some missing but what is important for me, no unnecessary feature ever got in my face while using this site.

As for the proposed redesign I think it's horrible.

You can barely see votes and up/downvote buttons that are very important for this site to work. If people can't find them and hit them less often more bad answers would be mixed with good ones.

User info is in prominent place and it is almost of no importance ~8k rep guy can give you bad answer. Votes on answer matter, not the rep of answerer. Also insane spacing around it immediately kills aesthetics of the whole design it might have possessed. I rarely see something that awful outside of works of beginner designers (and yes, also developers).

Putting main menu in the right top corner where are all the things that you don't usually care about until you want to search for something or log in is a bad idea. But I don't use this main menu all that much so probably it wouldn't hurt too much. ... Besides if you see input box in the top right corner what do you expect it to be? A spot where you can place your pizza order? Even if that box was empty as long as it looked as input box I'd have thought that this is serchbox and when I put some stuff there and hit enter site will be searched for occurrences of it.

Questions are just barely discernible from answers. Stackoverflow does this better but I'm not sure why. Maybe with spacing? Maybe by not discouraging you from reading it by putting it somewhere in the middle of gray background?

Only thing I think might be good in the redesign is exposing "Ask a Question". But I think SO does almost as good by surrounding this option with plenty of whitespace.

As a footnote:

Don't try to redesign how thing looks until you understand what it does.

"By developers for developers" sometimes works.

I suspect that one of the major reasons why big companies are incapable of innovating is that the top idea on most employees minds' is "What is my boss thinking about me?" Followed closely by "What are my coworkers thinking about me?" Social approval is a powerful motivator, particularly when that social approval is essential for your continued livelihood. Only the most self-confident (or delusional ;-)) people can completely ignore their boss's opinion and focus on innovating.

I suspect that at least some of Google's success has come from the hands-off culture of its management. You don't generally fear your manager's disapproval, since the bulk of your review comes from your peers. OTOH, you're still thinking about your coworkers' approval, and while it's a bit easier to ignore many people than it is to ignore one person, it's still hard. I suspect that one reason why startups can still out-innovate Google comes from an intense focus on their product, instead of being distracted by all the other perks, projects, and people at the Googleplex.

Similarly, scrappiness in a startup isn't just a matter of saving money. It's also a matter of avoiding distraction: when you're thinking about how awesome your life is, you aren't thinking about your product. You want enough perks so that employees don't have to have other things intrude on their consciousness (like where to buy lunch or what will happen to them when their COBRA benefits run out), but not so much that the perks distract from the project.

These days, the ground state of most people is aimless browsing, Facebook and Twitter.

Unfortunately,I am becoming most people and that has to stop now.