You're a smart fucking person. I love reading your comments!

Lost me at heavily sharded.

Then stick to being a hobbiest programmer and don't make it your career.

My main problem has always been that I strive for perfectionism in my work. It makes it difficult to hire and lead people because you always focus on the flaws. It also makes it very hard to accept that good enough is when things should hit the market, not when they are perfect. Getting over these issues is what is holding many people back and often is what they should be focusing on solving to be successful entrepreneurs.

A high achiever can probably do things better than most people, but even if you can do something twice as good as somebody else, you have limited time available. Hiring people and proper work division is essential to succeeding. If you want to be a developer, hire someone with a business sense to lead you. If you want to be a leader, don't tell your employees how to code, give them reasonable guidelines and if they are unable to live up to the guidelines then fire them. If you want to be both, which really isn't the best of ideas, don't bury yourself in detail and make sure not to look over your employees shoulders all the time.

Cool info!

Partially agree... although it's not healthy not to be able to delegate tasks and trust people take good care of you it's also not smart not to keep track of what's going on... problem is that programmers smart enough to manage a whole project usually don't work for a boss... I think the healthiest way is to either know how to manage programmers yourself (or be one) or get someone on board (on board being not 'just' on the payroll) that can take care of the technical side of your business. Don't underestimate the programming. Bad programming fixed by bad programmers leads to even worse programming usually and will always hurt maintainability of your site. Also, never put yourself in the position where the programmer can tell you what to do. If he's 'just' on the payroll and you get into an argument remember that most power is with the programmer. He has the power to take down a site at the flick of a switch... Not that you should be scared of hiring a programmer, but it's always smart to think about these things before you run into any problems...

I've been in this industry for a while now and I've seen programmers and tech people hijack a whole company. And not only in this industry. As many of you know I run a recording studio in the Netherlands. For an English movie I was hired to do the surround post processing, but the guy that did the audio kept some of the dialogs on his laptop so they couldn't go around him... of course he refused to give me the dialog of one actor and I couldn't do the surround mix... Better safe then sorry...

Some perfectionism in code, which leads to loss of focus on the scope of your business (i.e: to make the most money in shortest time as possible), often is caused by asperger syndrome. People in doubt can take a test here: http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php

When you own a company obviously you need to keep track of what is going on in it. But there is a big difference between keeping an eye on things and telling everybody what to do. Good leadership is far harder than programming, and like everything else it is a skill that needs to be constantly maintained. Keeping up with both programming (or really being any type of specialist) and being a good leader will not work for any but a lucky few.
In Sweden there aren't that many freelance programmers that are good, not that I have found anyway and trust me I have looked. Running a successful business here isn't that easy and good programmers are very sought after. Why work your ass off in your own business when there are hundreds of IT companies that offer you jobs with 35 hour work weeks (and you can usually work from home several days a week), 6 weeks vacation, pension, paid sick leave, private healthcare and $60K-$100K+ each year.

I've had several bad experiences taking on partners, I only take on external minority investors now. Bonuses works as great incentives if used right.
Bad code is a leadership problem, if the programmers don't get proper management and/or requirements then the code will be bad.
I never let programmers control the actual sites, they work with test sites until the code is ready to be deployed. Code security is very important, everything should be double-checked for malicious code and backdoors before being deployed.

There are untrustworthy people everywhere, I only trust people to the extent I can afford.