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Comment by danielpal | Hacker News Reader

From my list of top startups:

Heres the ones that strongly supports it:

  1. Square: Easy payments for the real world.   
  2. AirBNB: Lodging on the real world.    
  3. Pinterest: What I like of the real world.    
  4. Twitter: Whats going on right now in the real world.  
  5. Palantir: Intelligence of the real world.    
  6. Uber: Transportation in the real world.

Startups against it:

  1. Dropbox: Storage for my digital life.  
  2. Evernote: Notes for my digital life.    
  3. Box:  Enterprise collaboration.    
  4. Splunk: Visualizations of digital things.    
  5. Cloudera: Hadoop for Enterprises.

Not sure if it's very strong - seems like they are equally distributed.

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I'd put Pinterest and Twitter in the same category as Dropbox and Evernote. Evernote: What I note of the real world. Dropbox: Bring places from physical device A to physical device B.

But if you think it through, the whole list is kind of arbitrary too. Microsoft started as electrons-only company and was hugely successful.

I'd describe it less in terms of atoms and electrons, but in value delivered. And obviously, people derive value from both atoms and electrons. But they derive value differently from different services.

So, hugely successful companies help people to get value from their service and achieve something like money, fame, emotions (music, movies, art). More value for users = more success for the company.

If you accept Evernote in the atom category, you pretty much have to accept anything. Evernote notes are just bytes, and the way you interact with the app doesn't depend on whether the notes are about the real world, imagined worlds, future plans, or lunatic ravings. It's just bytes.

Bringing "physical devices" into the description of Dropbox doesn't actually imply anything; what else are you supposed to store files on? What else is any app supposed to run on? "Look at your friends' pictures on a physical device". Welp, I guess instagram is an atom company too. You've extended a useful, incomplete heuristic into a perfect, useless tautology.

I think the more useful definition of an "atoms company" is one that directly tells you which atoms to move and where to move them. This handily covers Uber, Amazon, Airbnb and very faintly Facebook, as expected, while mostly excluding Dropbox, Evernote, Google (search), etc.

You've extended a useful, incomplete heuristic into a perfect, useless tautology.

No, I just pointed out that the list of my parent poster is somewhat arbitrary. I'd put Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Dropbox, Evernote, Instagram all in the second category, because they exist only in digital life.

My atom life is complete without Facebook for instance. Whether I use Facebook or not makes not much difference. But booking a place via Airbnb has a direct (and only) result in the atom world: I now have a social acceptable reason to stay at a stranger's place. And furthermore: There's no other way to book that stranger's place except for maybe walking up to random strangers and asking them if they offer me a couch for 50 bucks.

I think the more useful definition of an "atoms company" is one that directly tells you which atoms to move and where to move them.

I mostly agree. But then it also depends if you take action in the atom world based on information you gathered from the electron world or not. And if you go down this route, the whole heuristic is completely nonsense, because people take action based on information gathered from electrons all the time.

I am not sure about Dropbox being in the second group. I can take a picture on my phone, return home its on my laptop and I can print it out and hand it to someone.

Likewise I can create a document on my laptop and save it in Dropbox. Later I can show it to someone in a restaurant on my cell phone.

Both are examples of bridging the real with the virtual world. Stuff I do on a weekly basis in interacting with my 97 year old non-digital Dad.

Heroku and GitHub were the first two that crossed my mind.

And they're "against it" in my interpretation of the idea.

Having said that, they do facilitate adding stuff to the first list (i.e. they are utilized by startups building services that do something in the real world).

EDIT: Added clarification of my cryptic reference to the "first list".

I think that github, heroku and others are simply positioned as providing services which the start ups who are "eating the world" are utilizing.

Yeah, that's what I meant by the last sentence :)

> From my list of top startups:

You know, a bunch of those aren't startups anymore, they're just businesses. Once you've found your strategy and are profitable, you're not a startup anymore, you're a business.

Twitter, Square, and Dropbox aren't startups anymore, they've been around for a while and are simply ordinary businesses.

You are missing the point. Call them however you want, startups or businesses, makes no difference. The point is I didn't just seek out to "proof" Sam was wrong - that would miss the point too. Instead, I followed the same steps he did.

He made a list of "breakout companies" and noticed most of them were startups that bridged the digital world with the real world. In my case the distribution was uniformly.

Perhaps do the same experiment yourself? Debating what is or what isn't a startup is not as valuable.

I wasn't disagreeing with your point; I don't even care about your point because it's as misplaced as the OP's. You're both self selecting companies you think are cool and then noting the pattern of real world vs not as if such a self selected list is in any way representative and not purely selection bias. It's silly, you see what you want to see based on a self selected list of "cool companies". It doesn't teach me anything of value.

> Debating what is or what isn't a startup is not as valuable.

Says who? It's valuable to me, I'm tired of seeing everyone call every damn company a startup cause it isn't so. A startup is a company looking for a viable business model who's still burning cash looking. It's not a profitable business who's been around for years. Making that distinction, while a side tangent, is worth making.

You don't get to tell me which part of a conversation I find interesting enough to engage on. That's my decision.

I'm tired of seeing everyone call every damn company a business cause it isn't so. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. It's can be profitable business who's been around for years. Making that distinction, while a side tangent, is worth making.

Very mature. /s

what about altmans facebook example? where do google, yahoo, heroku, github, wordpress, engine yard, groupon, admob, tumblr, twitter, foursquare...fit?

I specifically carved out enterprise software and developer tools--I think this mostly applies to consumer Internet.

As mentioned, Google is a good counterexample. Groupon and Foursquare very much touch the real world. I'd argue Yahoo made a mistake of not being enough in touch with the real world. Tumblr and Twitter are also reasonable counterexamples, although both were started before I think this trend became very strong.

Groupon and FourSquare both clearly fit. As does Yahoo with its publishing. The rest all at least arguably fit in developer tools (except admob and tumblr). Twitter facilitates live reporting of events.

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