I'm also out of the loop, there were tons of social media companies before Facebook so no creation of something new and disruptive. The comment you are responding to reads to me as survivor-ship fallacy of whatever social media company managed to move away from investor money and into ad money in an effective way. Which, in my opinion, seems like a luck factor mixed with more luck regarding on how the end users react to it (or if ad-free investor backed competition came at that moment too). In another world, MySpace would've done this transition but they didn't and someone would be arguing that MySpace and Tom is an excellent executive and that only them could achieve what was achieved.