The Hierarchy of Engagement | Hacker News Reader

The Hierarchy of Engagement

medium.com

21 pointstopherjaynes11 comments

This is one of those pieces where you read it, initially nod along and think it just seems like common sense, and then realise with a little sadness that your own businesses could probably be doing better if you spent more development effort on actually doing those common sense things. Well worth a read for would-be unicorns and smaller businesses alike, IMHO.

Thank you for posting!

Not to brag, but I could have predicted the rise of those examples given. Had I been able to invest, I would have done so. Evernote, on the other hand, I would have stayed away from..

How is that not just bragging?

If I were a VC investing in consumer internet technology, I would be looking for market dominance, a clean user experience, a unique angle that differentiates it from similar services, scalability, high profitability, relatively low costs, and broad appeal. Investing in Facebook in 2007 would have been easy, seeing that the site was already gaining a lot of traction and had high profit potential. Most social networks fizzle out pretty quickly. The hardest part is probably getting the opportunity to invest, not choosing the company.

I def. know a lot about this area, and myself predicted the rise of valuations of major web 2.0 companies like Facebook, Snapchat, and Uber.

But I don't think it's that hard of a skill picking the winners from the losers. But he problem is if everyone followed this strategy you would have a lot of unfunded companies.

It's survivorship bias. Sure, it's easy to point out how obvious the winners were, but there are probably 10 others that looked like winners but ended up failing.

It's not bragging because he hasn't actually done it and just talking about in on HN in retrospect. You and I could say the same thing too for example, and that wouldn't make us a bragger. It would however make us braggers if we actually did invest and made tons of money out of it.

It sounded like he was bragging that he could have done it.

This article has a bit of a 'just-so' vibe to me. What about a company like Uber? Uber doesn't have any virtuous loops, mounting loss, or cumulative benefits of use.

Now, I don't mean to argue against a straw man, I know that this article isn't claiming that only businesses with these features can be worth >1b - but exactly what is the ratio of companies north of 1b that have these properties? That is what really decides the predictive and analytic value of this model, not some cherry-picked stories that happen to adhere to it.

And also don't get me wrong, these things make intuitive sense to me as well. But i'd just like to see a more careful, rigorous analysis of these commonly accepted articles of faith in the startup world.

The original author does say in the introduction that this is a framework for evaluating "non-transactional consumer companies". Presumably in this context Uber is transactional.

Ah, you're right. Should have caught that.

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