In this Mixergy interview titled “Blasphemy & Revelation,” David Heinemeier Hansson explains his distaste for the tech world’s “swing for the fences” approach to business and why he feels it’s important to speak up about it.

The problem with swinging for the fences
Some ideas are so large and such a big gamble that either they’re going to be a flop or they’re going to be an amazing success. It seems like the vast majority of the tech startup community is working on that side of the idea fence. But I think people should also work on low risk, practical ideas.

I don’t have a trader’s mentality: “We are huge one day. We are down. We are huge. We are down.” I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.

The startup scene is too focused on “swing for the fences” type of ideas, either it’s going to go bust or it’s going to be this lavish, extreme success. I think we’d be better off with less of a focus on that and more of a focus on practical solutions to less grandiose problems.

The different kinds of risks
I think it’d be better if there was more “considered” risk taking. It’s not that you shouldn’t take any risks at all. Starting any company of any kind, even if you’re sure that it solves a problem for somebody, is going to be a risk. There’s a fair chance it won’t work.

But there are different kinds of risks. There’s the “1 in 10,000” or “1 in a 1,000,000 chance” of making something. And then there’s a “1 in 7 chance” or “1 in 14 chance.” I’m more in the “let’s take a 1 in 7 chance” rather than the “let’s take a 1 in 10,000 chance” category.

I get annoyed at the destruction of wealth, the creative inefficiencies. But it’s also deeper than that. It’s the corruption of youth. These “swing for the fences” kind of deals and companies have this intense spotlight on them. And it is brainwashing the next generation of starters to think that this is the way to go. That this is how you’re going to make it in startup land. And I think that’s absolutely horrible.

I don’t want the next generation of starters to think this sort of global approach is the only way they’re going to make it. I want them to see there are alternatives out there. That you can make it bootstrapped on your own. That you don’t have to rely on some sugar daddy giving you a big check.

The importance of being contrarian
I think it’s important that there are contrarian voices calling out things they see as unhealthy. I think the world would have been better off if the first dot-com bubble burst a couple of years earlier. The world would have been better off if the subprime bubble had burst earlier.

In all of these things, there are people who sit on perspectives or information or opinions that could, in however tiny a way, help sway public opinion. I certainly have no delusions of grandeur. A tweet on it is just a tiny drop in the ocean. But I also believe in compound impact. So enough tiny drops in the ocean and you can do something.

Note: Text above condensed and compiled from various answers. Watch the full interview below.

Exit Interview is a Signal vs. Noise series that talks to founders to see what happens after companies get acquired.

In October of 2006, Conde Nast’s Wired Digital bought online news aggregator reddit.com. “Our goal will be to build reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same,” Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital at the time, said in a statement.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit (right), stayed at the company for three years and then departed in October of 2009 saying, “It’s shocking to see how far the site has come.”

Below, Ohanian discusses how he feels now looking back at reddit’s path.

How do you feel about the acquisition of reddit?
I had so much going on in my life that I felt relieved more than anything else when we sold reddit. The site materially changed my life in a lot of ways, but I’m really proud of the three years Steve Huffman and I spent there after the acquisition. We could’ve comfortably left day one, but I know I personally was going to do my entire term because at the very least I owed it to my new employers that they get their money’s worth and to ensure the community that did so much for us. Plus, it was still lots of fun.

Fortunately, they were very interested in not screwing up a good thing, so I enjoyed a tremendous amount of freedom and we were largely left to guide the website as we saw fit. I was always dabbling in other products that I’d farm out to talented redditors I’d contract development of small projects to — things like reddit.tv we could tie into advertising deals without ruining the purity of the reddit.com experience. That particular site was built by a redditor named TriteLife for me, but has since been entirely rebuilt by a volunteer redditor who missed it so much after its run ended that he wrote a new one himself.

There have been bumps along the way, for sure, but we weathered some really rough economic times without ruining the user-first approach to product that keeps the site nearly ad-free (and when there are ads, they’re not obnoxious). Off the top of my head, I can’t say that about any site as big as reddit save Craiglist, which is a rather exceptional site.

Goldstar, now the fifth biggest ticket seller in America, started during a carpool.

In 2001, Rich Webster, Jim McCarthy, and Robert Graff were working together at a start-up called Kiko. “We lived near each other and worked about 20 miles away from work, so we car-pooled,” says Graff. “That start-up was a classic dot-com bubble flame-out. We raised and spent more than 10 million dollars in VC money, ‘pivoted’ every time an investor had a ‘big’ idea, and never launched a product. I think at one point there were 80 employees and 0 customers.”

Meanwhile, Graff was helping out a friend at a different company that was also headed downhill. That company did online “papering” (i.e. giving tickets away for free to fill a venue). During one of their commutes, McCarthy and Graff started talking about the flaw in the ticketing business. “No venue wants to be told that their product is worthless, and no customer wants to go see a show that’s unsellable,” explains Graff. “So we had an idea. We’d do the same thing, but we’d target the best entertainment. The most popular shows have unsold inventory too, and instead of charging the venue to give it away, we’d sell half-price tickets online and actually pay the venue. In October of 2001, we agreed to do it. The website launched in February.”

After leaving a start-up that blew millions of dollars without ever accomplishing anything (Graff: “too many angels and VCs calling the shots and no real focus on the product”), the founders worked hard to avoid funding on their new project. “We purposefully didn’t want anyone else’s money because we didn’t want their advice. We started with $1,000 and immediately paid $800 to the state,” Graff says.

“We purposefully didn’t want anyone else’s money because we didn’t want their advice.”

He did the product development, programming and sys admin. McCarthy did the marketing and customer service. Webster did the venue outreach. The workload split worked well. Graff (right) says, “Luckily, the three of us have very different skill sets and, combined, we had almost all the skills we needed — except design. For that we called upon a friend to do us a favor, and when the business started to look real, we gave him equity.”

For almost the first year, the company was just the three founders. “We worked from our homes and got together a few times a week,” says Graff. “We then got a tiny office with three desks so we could work together. Now with 50 employees, about half our staff works in our office and the other half from home.”

A different approach to tickets
Goldstar’s approach contrasts with other ticket sellers. Conventional brokers buy high-demand tickets and sell them at a premium, sites like stubhub.com let people sell tickets at market prices, eBay lets them auction to the highest bidder.

Goldstar, on the other hand, goes after leftover seats – to sports, theater, concerts, comedy, and more – and sells them at half-price. Venues cover costs and use the unsold inventory as a marketing tool to reach new audience. Customers get to try new things without the risk of paying full price. Graff says, “When we get people to go out and see a show or band they wouldn’t normally have gone to, it’s a win — a win for us, for our member, and for our venue.”

According to Graff, the company sold almost $40 million in tickets last year and has about 1.5 million customers. It’s partnered with MLB, Cirque du Soleil, NBA, Broadway, the Improv clubs, Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and more than 5,000 other venues and ticket suppliers across the country. It’s grown 40-50% annually for the last several years and expects to match or beat that this year too. The company also plans on adding about a dozen markets this year and is constantly acquiring new partners.

The founders have no interest in exiting either. Graff says, “There’s really no planned ‘end’ for something like this, unless you’re explicitly planning to sell. And while we do get inquiries about that, nothing so far has seemed to make sense compared to just continuing to build the business.”

Experts go with what they know. And they’ll often insist something needs to take a long time. But when you don’t have tons of resources, you need to ask if there’s a simpler, judo way to get the impact you desire. Sometimes there’s a better way than the “best” way.

I thought of this while watching “The Fighter” over the weekend. There’s a making of extra on the DVD where Mark Wahlberg, who starred in and produced the film, talks about how all the fight scenes were filmed with an actual HBO fight crew. He mentions that going this route allowed them to shoot these scenes in a fraction of the time it usually takes.

Every filmmaker that we talked to about directing this movie was like you can’t shoot the fights in 20 days, you need 35 days. And I said, “Well, we’re going to shoot the whole movie in 33 days and we’re going to shoot all the fights in three days.” And they said, “How are you going to do that? It’s never going to work.” And I said, “Because we’re going to film them like actual fights.”

So we literally did every fight from the actual beginning, coming out of the dressing room into the arena, into the ring, first bell, introductions, to the last bell, and everything. And we just did it over and over and over again.

And what I kept telling everybody is that HBO does it in one take and they don’t know what’s going to happen and they never miss a thing. We have the luxury of showing them what we’re going to do in the morning before we shoot it and doing it over and over and over again. So why do you need 20 days? For what? To jerk each other off? To touch up your makeup? To go in the trailer and take a nap?

We’re not talking about putting the camera in there and saying, “OK, we’re going to do a stunt punch here.” No, we’re going in there and beat the shit out of each other and we’re going to make it real.

Judging by the film’s success at The Oscars and the box office, the plan worked. And it’s a great example of reframing the problem and asking the right questions.

All these filmmakers insisted on a month+ to film the scenes because conventional wisdom says that’s the “right” way to do it. But sometimes conventional wisdom is more convention, less wisdom. And that’s when it pays off to take a questioning attitude and challenge assumptions.

Would taking the extra time with these scenes really add significant value? Sure, there’d be more slow motion, spit-flying, macro closeups. But would those shots really have made it a better film?

It ties in with another great question to ask: What problem are you solving? The goal was to make the fights seem real. Not to make them look good. To seem real. Focusing on that changes the requirements.

And that leads to another good question you should always come back to: Is there an easier way? The HBO fight crew is made up of experts at filming fights. They don’t need to be taught how to make it look real. They’re used to capturing a fight in one take — and that’s without knowing what will happen beforehand. Shooting this way is a piece of cake for them.

And maybe the most important question: What’s the opportunity cost? The whole film had a shooting calendar of 33 days. Filming it the HBO way means the movie gets made. A longer, pricier approach might have doomed the film and prevented it from ever being shot in the first place.

Most of us aren’t filming fight scenes. But the way Wahlberg and his team challenged assumptions and questioned traditional “best practices” is something that can be applied to all kinds of arenas, not just boxing ones.

Below: (Spoiler Alert! Don’t watch if you don’t want to know the outcome of a fight in the film.) This video compares Micky Ward vs. Shea Neary in “The Fighter” with the real fight.