cubes

The content in the article isn't inaccurate or misleading per se, but it's also basically repackaging well understood information about the economics of startups and venture backed businesses.

Further, the author asserts that, if you're trying to optimize your personal economic outcomes, you should not pursue venture funding. But this wrongly assumes that money is the sole motivator people have for starting a business. Further, it ignores the massive economic value that the venture ecosystem has created.

Some people want to retire early. Some people have bigger ambitions. Neither group is right or wrong, but, if you're starting the business, you should know which group you're part of.

History is littered with dead startups that designed for scale before they had enough usage to justify it. Within reason, having users knock your site over resulting in failures like the Twitter Fail Whale is a good problem to have.

With that said, you need to be prepared to scale up quickly once you have this problem. There's a reason Facebook counts its users in the billions, and Friendster is a footnote in internet history.

I agree that shell accounts weren’t as important by the aughts, but the culture was still going strong in the early aughts.