mjnaus

People moaning "I am just a tiny hacker" or "You should be directing this at people with money" are either lacking vision or are just not interested in making the world a better place but prefer chasing the mighty dollar. Which in it itself is fine, but then come out and be honest about it.

There are tons of ways even individual hackers can put their skills to use while solving real world problems. No one is expecting you to solve the problems of world hunger or poverty but bitching "I can't" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Have a look at Kiva (kiva.org) for example. They did have a vision and they are doing a pretty damn good job making the world a better place by working on a real-world problem instead of finding a new and "revolutionary" way to figure out what your friends are doing right now.

Gross of the people in the valley are probably to busy liking themselves and praising their good-for-nothing ideas to actually sit down and look at the world in a bit wider perspective.

The world is bigger then the sub-reality that is Silicon Valley.

They probably don't know just yet that the "next version" of the web is about semantics. Maybe someone should inform them about this?!

If Scribd would be a technology startup in the sense that it would leverage NEW technology or develop NEW technology, it would make sense for it to take a longer period of time to become profitable.

However, Scribd is just another company leveraging the internet delivering a service to their customers. Nothing great and nothing fancy going on there and if the idea would indeed be worth the effort, they should have no problem starting of profitable or getting it profitable within the first year of operation.

Sure! Looking for ways to burn through $4M in cash, even my 12 year old nephew will come up with some way! I bet I could do it with half the staff in have the time. Pissing away money is easy. However, this doesn't makes it good business.

And when you're already planning to take three years to come up with a business model, FOR GODS SAKE drop the whole thing and do something useful with your time and other peoples money.