Hacker News Reader

Is the most important decision to avoid corruption choosing a good business to go into in the first place? Because I feel like some businesses, like free social media which make their money off of ads, are more corruptible than others.

View on HN

Of course that's true, but then don't forget that business model is a choice.

How do you think founders should feel about advertising then? Eg Ben Thompson always argues that consumer products where you want to maximize audience (eg to distribute fixed costs, benefit from scale, power a multi-sided flywheel) should prefer advertising, but obviously this forces a specific trajectory to the business.

If you run into a product with this type of dynamic is your advice just to run? Or is there strategy innovation we can do here to monetize businesses shaped like this to get a flywheel without ads?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com