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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something. The exact same criticisms would apply to Airbnb, for example. “They have not the slightest idea how the hotel industry works. This is a very professional industry with a lot of legal hurdles...”

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Just because people think an idea is bad is doesn't mean it's a billion dollar startup idea. Indeed, most ideas people think are bad are actually bad - it's only the few outliers that are actually successful. Even then I think there is a ton of mythologizing around this idea that the founders were able to see something nobody else did, usually to make the founders look like some sort of diamond-in-the-rough geniuses, when in reality what they built was just a natural evolution of tech that existed at the time (successful founders usually just execute better and faster than others).

I mean, despite all stuff I've heard on HN about how a lot of big VCs passed on AirBnB, when I first heard of it it seemed like a very natural evolution from sites like Couch Surfing and VRBO that had existed for years.

Well, Airbnb and Uber aren’t the best examples, are they? Their growth and “success” is fueled by either operating in a legal gray zone, or defying the local regulations all together. Many people all over the world think their lives were made much worse since Airbnb is negatively affecting the long-term rental market.

Point is, the effect of the company on the society can’t just be measured by market cap.

Back to the original article, the author was using statistical analysis to provide medical advice. Now, it’s incredibly easy to arrive to false conclusions with statistics. That’s why there’s regulations, peer reviews etc. What if the “Egyptian contractors” screwed the data up. Was the founder qualified to spot an issue?

I think they’re ideal examples. Market cap is pretty much everything. It affects the world more than morals do.

HN has drifted further and further from reality, which has been very strange to watch. The classic example was someone dismissing Dropbox when they first launched, but now it’s turned into dismissing billion dollar companies after they’ve clearly won.

Only the parent doesn't dismiss "billion dollar companies", they dismiss comparing them to shut down, non winning, companies like in TFA.

Ah yes, one failure = the idea is horrible. Another classic trope.

Well, the idea was rejected by patients, advertising revenue, and doctors...

I also note the "weasel word" idea. This wasn't just an idea, but an implementation.

The same thing might make sense as a value-added feature in a more comprehensive health service (so the "idea" might be good when put in that use).

But as an idea for a service based entirely on it, it failed hard. What exactly twist do you have in mind to save it? Or are you just saying "we'll never be sure" with more words?

If you study a lot of history, you start to notice that old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good. Cannons sucked for a long time, till Napoleon showed they weren’t so bad.

I think posting haughty words is a lot easier than trying to make something work.

>If you study a lot of history, you start to notice that old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good.

Also the opposite: dumb ideas are tried again and again to no avail ever.

Adding as example of dumb ideas, people constantly trying to patent perpetual motion machines.

Nitpic on Napoleon, cannons were used centuries before him in sieges. People knew they were good all along.

You’re constantly steering the conversation somewhere else, aren’t you?

The meta-analysis idea wasn’t terrible. It’s just that there’re many assumptions in a statistical sense, the founder might not be the right person to implement it and he might have targeted the wrong market. Some people are under the impression that everything can be solved just by build an app. However, some fields are much more complicated than your gig economy food delivery.

Also known as “having a conversation.” I’m not sure why you don’t see the bad faith in your words, but I have no interest in talking more. Goodnight.

Wasn't the someone who dismissed Dropbox when they first launched Steve Jobs?

How is that a "classic example" of drifting away from reality? "I don't think this startup business that doesn't seem likely to succeed will succeed" is a comment that looks funny in hindsight, that's all

Arguably one reason those two businesses were successful in areas with entrenched players and business practices was because they handle the money. If AirBnB was asking either travelers or hosts to pay $X to be on a recommendation site, probably very few people would. There's always a cheaper competitor when you're selling information. Because you book through AirBnB, for a service which is relatively expensive, they can skim off quite a lot of money in an opaque way.

> Their growth and “success” is fueled by either operating in a legal gray zone, or defying the local regulations all together.

We just got an impossible vaccine in under a year, I'm happy for all of medicine to spend a bit of time in a "legal gray zone" to see what might happen.

> Many people all over the world think their lives were made much worse since Airbnb is negatively affecting the long-term rental market.

Absolutely, just like the Luddites (Although they would be well off Luddites) their world is worse. But humanity has been made far better.

Aren't you falling for the survivorship bias trap? Sure, people have said that about Airbnb. But I think there are loads of that startups that failed because they didn't understand the industry they were in, or because of legal hurdles.

I think there's probably a lot more to be learned about business success by studying business failures. There's certainly a load more source material.

At least the last part seems to be right, doesn't it? As a user I love Airbnb, way cheaper and better than hotels, epsecially with a family.

Saying that there was a nuanced difference in what these two companies tried to accomplish would be a gross understatement.

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