This For That

avc.com

14 points·btrautsc··6 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866938

He's talking about startups that try to be x for y for no reason besides that x and y are in fashion. His two counterexamples support your point.

No he's not. He doesn't talk about that subset of the "this for thats" until the last graf of the article. The balance of the article is spent explaining the concept of "this for that", suggesting that "this for thats" have a harder time getting funded, and acknowledging that several USV investments can easily be described as "this for thats".

I found the article hard to follow, not least because it's hard to find a startup that can't be described as "this for that". Every startup is "for" something. And very few startups are sui generis.

Only the fourth paragraph talks about what you just mentioned. From the other paragraphs my takeaway was that startups have to start at a problem, and then happen to make something that can retrospectively be described as x for y, like Edmodo's and SoundCloud's founders did. This as opposed to trying to be x for y just because x or y is hot.

I'm not saying the article was good, just pointing out what it said.

If "this for that" is the raison d'etre of the startup, that's a red flag.

Most of the time it's just the best way of describing a startup in 3 words or so. Our startup, http://clara.io/, is "google docs for 3D animation". It's not a great explanation of what we do or why, but it's about as good as you can get in a very short sentence.

The something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere - Peter Thiel

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