I agree. Unless you know you are building something that will start out needing millions of transactions per second, you are more likely over-designing if you are building a bespoke database.
Standard tools are useful because you can get to working code fast ... this is why LAMP is still such a powerful framework upon which to build. While it may make sense to consider adding a search indexer (Solr) or key-value cache (Redis), for almost every use case, rewriting data storage is a waste.
Also, to paraphrase Ted Dziuba, it probably doesn't matter if your product doesn't scale, because nobody cares, or will ever use it. So I think it is better to get something up and running quickly to see if anyone cares before you bother trying to optimize for the rare case where your product turns out to be the next Twitter.
I first read about the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) in the book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. The central shorthand for breaking through to talking about results rather than attendance as a measure of work is:
TIME + PHYSICAL PRESENCE != RESULTS
And yes, they do in fact agree with masklinn's comment that if someone can finish their job in a few hours instead of 40, that the person is perfectly free to take the rest of the time to do other (non-work) things. The job of management is to come up with tasks that are important to the business, and that justify the person's continuing to work there (aka results).
As for the "sucking", they go into it in detail in the book, but I also like Paul Graham's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss".
Starting anything and seeing it through takes courage. However, it doesn't seem more courageous to me to start a company with, say, $200k in the bank than to start with no money. Runway matters.
Assume that he really cannot dole out a huge salary ... how much should he be offering in equity?
Assume that I'm a badass software developer who specializes in scalable web-based systems. In that case, you can also assume that a.) plenty of people approach me with their middling ideas all the time, wanting me to work for peanuts/equity, and b.) I already have a job.
What else could he offer that I might find motivating?
Standard tools are useful because you can get to working code fast ... this is why LAMP is still such a powerful framework upon which to build. While it may make sense to consider adding a search indexer (Solr) or key-value cache (Redis), for almost every use case, rewriting data storage is a waste.
Also, to paraphrase Ted Dziuba, it probably doesn't matter if your product doesn't scale, because nobody cares, or will ever use it. So I think it is better to get something up and running quickly to see if anyone cares before you bother trying to optimize for the rare case where your product turns out to be the next Twitter.