dlu

Your main beef is that Alan was "either naive or not truthful" or that things changed over the course of 7 years?

I love this article and it is a pretty great handbook on a variety of tactics you normally don't get much depth about. But I wish the whole thing was prefaced with, this mostly matters after you've found an audience. (Or product/market fit if you're pmarca)

"Why did group therapy work when individual didn’t? Part of it was that having nine different mirrors reflect back my problematic behavior brought into brilliant and incontrovertible light what I had been able to avoid confronting"

Sometimes we aren't aware of how badly we want and choose ignorance and avoidance

You know how in the innovator's dilemma, the point at which the new innovator gets a foothold is also the point where the old firm has peak profits? I think there's a similar thing where the best time to user a particular service is when the service is least profitable.

That's what the 2012 nostalgia sounds like to me. Back when Twitter was hosting revolutions, but still having issues with uptime (not to mention revenue). And Project Loon was alive, but mostly getting mocked by both Wall Street and charities/nonprofits (With Bill Gates being the most visible).

I also suspect 2012-2014 was when SoundCloud had huge amounts of traffic and, without any way of making money, at its least profitable. I have no actual evidence of this.

Personally, Project Loon always sounded like some crazy way of getting more people to use Google than actual charity. Like some weird extrapolation from, "the more people that use the Internet, the more money Google makes" and "Google's reached market saturation in current markets, we need growth in developing countries"

Going off memory for all this. Sorry if I get some details wrong about Innovators Dilemma, Twitter in 2012, Project Loon and such.

What? I had no clue this was comming. I'm surprised there wasn't more signs

More of a logic question, though at its core math is logic and pattern recognition.

I'm certainly going to need a lot more practice if I want to place in Singapore's top 40% of 14/15 year olds

I don't think it ever was a chocolate factory of awesome. It's just been around long enough (and had enough people work there) that we hear about it more

According to one recent grad. Why is this even an article?

This will be interesting to see how many people use a stand-alone web client for messaging rather than just facebook.com I wonder if they'll also tear this out from the core facebook website

Angry much?

You lost me with the "code isn't a good that spoils" line. It is a great phrase, but perhaps you could re-explain?

Hey look, it's something Sam Altman suggested, but happening in real life

Oh thank goodness. We should be celebrating the end of NPAPI

What cloud storage provider do you prefer or are you rolling your own infrastructure?

Hrm, didn't think this particular "Twitter fight" would end up as an article. I see Kevin's point, but maybe I've been in the water too long. It doesn't bother me much. There's plenty of networking and such already. Serial entrepreneurs have nearly as many connections as any VC would anyways. And the VC partner that is "self-dealing" isn't going to be able to deal himself single-handedly. There are other partners at the firm.

There's lots of other unfair things in the Valley when it comes to privilege like this.

And so the YC behemoth grows. Congrats, I look forward to being lectured many times about needing secrets and monopolies.

And focusing not on being the first product to market, but the last.

Did I miss any Thiel-isms?