In the previous essay, we saw how time constraints turn pet projects into real products. But time isn’t the only parameter we can constrain. All software costs money to build. So, put a cap on it. Capping cost makes us creative. It helps us figure out a more efficient way of using our resources.

Consider all the sad stories of lottery winners who go from working nine-to-five jobs to suddenly having more cash than they know what to do with. Rather than save their money, they go off throwing it away on things like...yachts. They give away thousands to long-lost relatives. After a while, many of them go into debt and are worse off than had they not won at all. They didn’t realize a million dollars is still a finite amount of money. Even though the monetary walls are spread further apart, they are still there.

This, too, is why so many venture capitalist--backed start-ups have failed. Back in the original dot-com era, a VC throwing fifty million dollars to a group of guys with a lofty idea but no proof of success was commonplace. With so much money in play, it was easy to decide that the necessary next step was a big downtown office, a few hundred out-of-college new hires, and a board of directors. After all, if a VC was going to give you that much money, you better do something with it.

When the market set the value of untested companies so high, it inflated the worth of the idea rather than the worth of the work. It wasn’t necessary to get a small product out in the market early to see whether it had any promise. Tweaking a few features and redeploying software didn’t merit another million dollars. Instead of using the size of their customer base to determine the size of their web servers, some companies would just buy up the entire server farm and wait for the customer base to grow.

A bottomless bank vault took the urgency out of succeeding. Many companies found ways of being productive, but that kind of productivity wasn’t focused on the product.

Had Kozmo.com, a VC-backed company that delivered food and entertainment goods to your doorstep for no delivery fee been given only a few hundred thousand dollars to operate, it may have felt the urgency to turn a profit a bit quicker. Instead, Kozmo.com blew through several hundred million dollars, expanding its highly unprofitable service to nine major U.S. cities.^[7] By the end of the third year, Kozmo.com liquidated. By not having to worry about a profitable product early on, Kozmo never got a chance to adjust a promising idea into a solid product.

When we don’t have the walls around us, whether they are walls around time, cost, or a feature set, we lose sight of reality. We make questionable decisions because nothing is forcing us to choose wisely. Our productivity isn’t spent on the important things.

If you want to develop great software, set up and obey the walls around you. Make every step you take a step toward building a more successful application. There are not enough resources to do anything else.