pegobry

I hope you're right and that's how it will work out, though.

It's growing faster from a smaller base, though. I find more relevant that Tumblr is still much, much bigger. And I think it will stay that way.

Again -- I may be proven wrong in six months or a year, and if so I admit it publicly right here (in fact, do you want to make a bet?). But I think at this stage the data warrants the trend I extrapolate from it.

If you have actual traffic stats I'd love to see them. ;)

Also, the estimate isn't for "a couple months", but for the past 12 months, and the trend points in one direction. Even less reliable but even more "damning" is Google Trends: http://google.com/trends?q=tumblr,+posterous&ctab=0&...

That being said, your general point is right: nothing is preordained, and the trends could switch around tomorrow, and the picture look much different a while from now. But that's why I have a blog: this is the situation as I see it today. Maybe six months from now I'll eat my words, who knows?

Although it seems pretty obvious that both are headed for a combination of advertising/freemium model, and the revenue that comes from that seems pretty correlated to userbase size.

The Company A vs Company B thing is just (to my mind) a particularly stark example of these broader points I try to make.

I'm not saying startups should not be metrics-driven. Design and engineering are both driven by metrics. But they're different mindsets. And in this case, one is clearly winning.

You're also right that the zero-sum fallacy is wrong. However, those two companies are competitors in the market and one, at least on publicly available data, is winning hands down.

The Compete data seems to show Posterous stagnating just shy of 1M uniques for the past few months while Tumblr's curve is stuck "up and to the right," though.

Am I trolling? I don't think so, insofar as I use a provocative example to illustrate trends that I do think are important: the coming of age of New York as a startup hub and as a "school" for building consumer startups, and the growing importance of design vs. "hard" technology in building a successful consumer web app.

As for Tumblr's top tier investors -- sure, that's true. I was trying to emphasize that Posterous, on paper, has everything it takes to win.

After googling "AOL acquisitions".

Hope this helps!

But the problem with that is that the original iMac, the product that made Apple relevant again, was conceived before Jobs' return. To be sure, he added his magic to the product that eventually came to market, but it was very much the case of Jobs imroving on someone else's product. (As was the case, more debatably, for the iPod)

The difference wasn't that Jobs dreamt them up from start to finish -- it was that he could take credit for them from start to finish.

Companies that have had shoddy products coming out of China are companies that don't pay attention to their supply chain -- and Apple is fanatical about supply chain management.

Furthermore, the ethical problem of manufacturing in China isn't the same as that of practicing censorship in China. If tomorrow Western companies got out of China, besides unleashing an economic apocalypse that would make the last two years look like a rainy picnic, China wouldn't suddenly turn into Sweden. It would turn into Cuba, or North Korea. An angrier, more nuclear-armed North Korea. Nobody would win in this scenario, least of all the Chinese citizens we all want to eventually live in a prosperous, democratic country.

The US credit bubble of 04-10 is a blip compared to the rise of Asia, hundreds of millions, soon billions of people rising out of peasant poverty and into the global middle class. It's as historic as the Industrial Revolution or the Green Revolution, and so big we seldom notice it.

But it really is the defining economic fact of our era.

I think what matters is that the VC is always transparent to the entrepreneur about it. They can recommend their partner by saying "I think they'll be good for you because X, Y and Z, but I also owe them a favor because they let me invest in Foo.com."

Sophisticated execution, absolutely. Zynga are extremely smart and dedicated about honing every single aspect of their games to enhance their addictiveness and virality. They didn't beat everyone else who wants their spot by being lucky.

The Economist had a very good article on this dispute a while back, don't know if it's been paywalled yet.

Most big EU VCs are in London but they invest all over the continent. Skype was started on the shores of the Baltic, but is headquartered in Luxembourg, has programmers in Eastern Europe and offices in London.

Saul is right, it would take a very long time to have Europe be a "distributed Silicon Valley", and maybe it's impossible, but it's still a very encouraging thought (dream?).