There was a period in my life when I was helping build an Internet company called Digital Chainsaw. That name probably dates the story better than anything else I could say. This was the late 1990s, when the Internet was exploding, companies were appearing almost overnight, and everybody seemed to know somebody who was suddenly worth millions because they had a website, a business plan, and enough confidence to explain why the normal rules no longer applied. Digital Chainsaw was not imaginary, though. We had real customers, real revenue, real infrastructure, and a real commercial web-hosting operation that was doing a surprising amount of work with very little equipment.

I was not one of the guys in the suits. I was the guy in jeans who made things work. If a customer needed something unusual, I figured out how to make it happen. If something broke, I figured out why. If the servers needed changing, if an account needed creating, if the network needed to do something it had never done before, or if a piece of software simply did not exist yet, I wrote it or built around the problem. Digital Chainsaw had plenty of people, but the technical operation had grown in a very organic way, and an enormous amount of the knowledge about how it really worked was in my head. That was not because I was trying to make myself indispensable. It was simply what happens when one person builds something piece by piece over years and keeps solving problems as they appear. You remember why something was done a certain way because you were there when the original problem happened.

What we had built was actually pretty remarkable for the time. This was commercial web hosting on a fairly large scale, yet the core operation ran on roughly a dozen medium-sized computers, and they were not even what most people would have called serious server-grade machines. It worked because I had engineered the system around efficiency. I did not believe in solving every problem by buying more hardware o