by the way his idea is already implemented by others: www.feeds2.com
"All these companies will keep getting bought up, but the acquirers are not going to see great returns."
gettting acquired without the potential of revenue? show us these dump acquirers, others would be interested too!
he sais he likes companies like Joost, that have real technology behind them. Yeah, it also has 100 employees.
So what if his idea has already implemented? Google's idea had been implemented by others as well. Just that Google does it better. It's possible that his startup might do it better.
I kind of agree with you that he has no solid data on these "dumb buyers" but I think the word "acquired" should be swapped with "invested". There are a lot of web 2.0 companies that don't have strong revenue but got a lot of money via investment. Let me ask you back, can you give example of web 2.0 companies with strong revenue record?
The best deal I've seen so far was Flickr's 30-40 million dollars. The rest seem to be over valued.
What's wrong with Joost and 100 employees? If Joost really needs 100 employees, be it. They have a solid product compare to most of YCombinator companies out there.
By the way, out of 50 YComb companies out there, I only use Reddit.
It's natural investments may turn out wrong. Especially when expectations are larger than the potential, which is what happens..
He can do whatever he wants with his free time. I don't care. But telling everyone that is pointless if you don't solve a computer science problem, he is really illusionating himself. And raising his recomendation engine as the ultimate computer science problem is really ridicilus.
I will put it this way:
It was said during the International Symposium in Computer Architecture this year, although, i'd be mistaken who said it. I think it was put something like this to the crowd:
"We asked teenagers to tell us what is the most significant discovery. Their answer? YouTube That's what happened, we've gone so far with technology that we neglected what is important to the people."
If what's important is to fulfill teenagers' fantasy, all of us should build more social network a'la MySpace, Xanga and create cyberworld a'la ClubPenguin, BarbieWorlds, CyWorlds instead of helping the Health industry.