http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/03/09.html

I know, daddy's house and all.  But do YOU have stacks of $100 bills in your snack room?  I wonder what you're supposed to use them for?

"Needless to say, the new investors will want to keep an eye on all that money, so Neil Rimer from Index will be joining the board of directors, and Bijan Sabet from Spark will be an observer on the board (he can come to meetings but he can’t vote). "

Heh, heh, heh.  They are so screwed.

Kudos to them. They are really succeeding, and the success is well-deserved.

It's just too bad that Joel is such a fucking egotist.

Hate to, but muppet+++

those are novelty (fake) dollars, I'd bet on it.

NO WAY.  You think that's a JOKE?!  You don't think Joel ACTUALLY has self service Benjamins in the snack room?

NO!!

Doesn't every company?

Seriously though, I assumed it was a couple of real $100 bills in front of a fake brick, obviously as a humor photo. Otherwise they're far too close to reality to be a novelty item (they cross over into being quite illegal).

Jesus some of you can be seriously literal sometimes.  Then again, this is a forum full of literally minded Asperger's sufferers.  I sometimes forget.

The original posts implied it was real money with no smileys or emoticons; I thought the posters were really that dumb, yeah.

I glanced at the picture - mentally noted: yeah, that's cute, another ego sop for Joel, move along.

If you read the actual Stackexchange blog post, the picture makes more sense, it fits with the light and breezy (ie annoying) tone of the post.

Yes, it really helps when a self-satisfied egotist gets people to throw money at him.  Then he's a RICH, justified self-satisfied egotist who can afford to put stacks of $100 bills in the snack room.

Well, okay, he can't afford to really do that.  But he can take a couple of $100 and make pretend piles of them and take pictures to celebrate that he COULD if he really wanted to.

I just think it's going to be hard on that self-satisfied egotist the first time one of his venture capitalists begins to question how he operates.

My guess is that the experienced techies who read Joel 8-10 years ago have moved on and pay no attention to him now, because he is now just posturing.

Joel's market now is the young YCombinator-interested kids who are attracted to the bright lights and image.

It's obviously a stack of $5 or $10 he got from the bank with a couple $100 on top.

The article is meant to be humorous, such as his treatment of losing control of company to VC egoists.

I do wonder why the VC's are putting in so much money, if you look at the number of posts all the other sites are minuscule compared to Stack Overflow.

Anybody taking bets on how long before jef and joe get pushed out of their own business by the vulture capitalists?

>Anybody taking bets on how long before jef and joe get pushed out of
>their own business by the vulture capitalists?

Probably only when they decide to sell. I imagine the VCs haven't taken enough stock to actually wrestle control away, despite firehosing them with money.

Joel isn't personally invested at all, the whole thing is an experiment in VC cashing out to him and is for shits and giggles. Notice that FC doesn't take investors, that's the one he's emotionally involved in.