In the context of startups, I think reinventing the wheel makes sense when it's your primary product and you can do better than what's out there. Most of the examples listed in the article fit this. If it's what you spend all day thinking about and working on, you're probably better suited to reinvent it than anybody else.
Reinventing the wheel doesn't make as much sense for something that isn't your core product. For example, if you're trying to create the next personal financial webapp, it may not make sense to embark on a project to create a new JavaScript AJAX framework or message processing queue, since those aren't your product and there are a bunch of decent libraries already. There are counterexamples to this (Ruby on Rails), but in most cases, startups with limited resources need to take advantage of existing libraries/systems as much as possible. Reusing existing technology frees up more time to worry about your core product.
100% agree and a point I was trying to make. This whole thing was a response to a reply to a comment I made. I had made a comment that the library they were doing a tutorial on was stupid because it could be done better and I could do it better. They then told me not to reinvent the wheel since it was already done by "geniuses". But yes, exactly.
I use jQuery, but I usually write my own plugins. Id never been able to write a library like jQuery on my own, or in any reasonable time frame, but I can write a slideshow for example in the same amount of time it takes me to find one that works for the project, read through the docs, read the API and implement it. But to some, and some past clients, thats stupid and im "reinventing the wheel."
Reinventing the wheel doesn't make as much sense for something that isn't your core product. For example, if you're trying to create the next personal financial webapp, it may not make sense to embark on a project to create a new JavaScript AJAX framework or message processing queue, since those aren't your product and there are a bunch of decent libraries already. There are counterexamples to this (Ruby on Rails), but in most cases, startups with limited resources need to take advantage of existing libraries/systems as much as possible. Reusing existing technology frees up more time to worry about your core product.