The other side of massive isolated productivity is: nobody except them knew it or could maintain it.  Yahoo ended up doing the whole &quot;rewrite lisp in C++&quot; thing because you can&#x27;t hire &quot;experts in paul graham&#x27;s custom lisp macros&quot; at scale.<p>But, it worked, didn&#x27;t it?  Grow, scale, cash out, dump code on non-founders, become startup messiah.