It's a great time to be a software developer. Platforms are steadily becoming more mature, useful tools are released almost daily and things that seemed hopelessly futuristic only a few years ago are suddenly commercially viable. Despite this, the software world is awash with bullshit. The success of the largest technology companies has led to a very skewed set of lessons. This narrow focus is amplified by the venture capital industry and the fact that nobody really knows what's going to happen next. The good news is, none of this actually matters. The basics of creating something useful and selling it for money remain the same. In this talk, I'm not going to give you "one weird trick" or tell you to ~* just follow your dreams *~. But I'll share some of the things we've learned from building a successful software company around commercial developer tools and our open-source library spaCy.