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Comment by naravara | Hacker News Reader

I think Clubhouse is making a big mistake if they don't sell out to a bigger player. It's like the Steve Jobs quote to Dropbox about how what they have is a feature, not a product. What Clubhouse offers should be built into a broader social network since it clearly can't survive on independently for the reasons Shaan mentions.

Discord is already launching "Stages" which aims to replicate Clubhouse's main selling point. And I'm sure Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for them too. I have trouble seeing how they survive.

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Except Dropbox succeeded as a separate company by most reasonable metrics.

The Jobs offer was $1B IIRC; they’ve got a $12B market cap and some reasonable ROI far beyond the acquisition offer by now (remember even the IPO investors - non-retail - bought in at $21).

Whether the total ROI exceeds the growth / rate of return in AAPL stock during that time, well, maybe not? But it would have been a cash transaction...

Jobs offered to buy them in 2009 when AAPL stock was around $5 a share (obviously a lot of splits happened), compared to today's price of over $120 so that $1B in stock would be around $25B, more than double Dropbox market cap

But like I said, it would have almost certainly been a cash transaction, right? So yeah, engineers who were retained would have done better with their AAPL stock grants, but that’s not really the measure to compare is it?

By that logic most companies should have dissolved and simply bought AAPL shares with their proceeds (I mean that’s true up to some limit but it falls apart in some macroeconomic sense obviously).

Dropbox also evolved into something more than what it was at the time of Steve's quote right?

I feel like both Steve can have been right, and Dropbox successful because it chose to do more than just be a feature.

Couldn't agree more. Not only is it a feature, not a product, but it's a niche feature at that. The vast majority of people I know who have used Clubhouse find it fascinating at first and then within a day or two realize it's mostly boring content and never touch it again.

Yeah, "live audio" is going to be the next "Stories" feature.

CH gathers users' contacts lists probably in an attempt to increase its valuation in the market. If you can clone CH but don't have the same data about users, it makes sense to just buy CH.

I don't like CH because I don't like anything that only caters to "elites" and select groups. IMO, that goes against the very purpose of the Internet.

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