his point is that a startup should be resourceful period. a startup doesn't have to think of liquidating their assets unless they are going out of business. I use a 10yrs old ibm thinkpad. I've been hacking Unix systems 1994 and started writing C/x86 asm back then. I get odd looks when I go to meetups and pull out my old clunky hardware. I bought it for $100 3 years ago, it works great for me. No matter how fast/sexy my machine is, it doesn't write the code. I do! I've always stayed with older machines due to an experience I had around 97. I had an IRC friend in Poland, he had a 8086 machine. I had a 486 or possibly early pentium. He wrote a routine that was way faster than mine because his only experience was through his 8086, so he had to make it fast enough for himself. I realize that having top of the line hardware puts me at a disadvantage, I can't assume that most of my customers are going to use the latest. I work as if they are going to use the slowest. Th e only time to code with the latest/shiny is multimedia intense projects like game development. Web development? You can use a 15yr old computer.
> The only time to code with the latest/shiny is multimedia intense projects like game development.
Your anecdote was exactly the refutation of this statement. :) Game developers are often encouraged to work on median-spec systems because games are expected to run on a variety of configurations. You don't want to develop The Sims on a quad-core Xeon with multiple GT680s, only to find that it doesn't run on your mom's 2005 Core 2 Duo with integrated graphics. The people working with the asset pipeline/level editor might want some extra horsepower (end-users aren't expected to be able to run the level-editor, so it's usually not very optimized) but the programmers don't frequently need it.
Also, though, I disagree with this:
> a startup doesn't have to think of liquidating their assets unless they are going out of business
The most important thing to keep in mind, as any sort of business owner, is your BATNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...). It drives all your major decisions--should we raise funding, should we get acquired, should we IPO, should we declare bankruptcy, etc. And the "baseline" BATNA is always "how much money would we have as runway if we just liquidated everything, fired everyone, and started over?" It shouldn't be a consideration, but it should always be a benchmark to observe your distance from. More liquid assets means more negotiating room, basically.
But really, my point wasn't about liquidating assets, it was mostly about cashflow. A startup, like any business, both earns and spends money. Leasing means you have more cashflow. It's the same reason you don't buy physical servers right away--you don't want to lock that money up if you don't know if you'll need it.
