1. This sounds an awful lot like the story of NeXt, from making their own custom hardware, to the super advanced software development environment that they eventually tried to sell by itself for other platforms. Too bad there was no struggling, mainstream company to buy them that they could have then taken over from the inside.

2. Half way through, I was thinking, it would be fun to contrast this with ITA as bad and good examples of how to start a Lisp company with a bunch of guys from MIT. And then he says he works at ITA! So, lesson is, if you're going to start a Lisp company, don't make Lisp the product, make it your secret weapon.