No investor says "Well, whoever wrote this script obviously put a lot of effort into it, so here $50 million". But I'm sure hollywood community also encourages each other for their creativity no matter how crazy something sounds. Encouragement and actually putting in $50million are very different things. Everyone outside of silicon valley will react the same way you do, and that's why silicon valley is necessary because it's one of the few places on earth where you can talk about ridiculous stuff and not worry about being judged, which encourages creativity. (For example, most people will think "AirBnB for pets" is an idiotic idea and it probably is, but the fact that people can talk about these things freely is a good thing)
It's not cool to criticize startups in silicon valley because that's what the place stands for. There's already enough people in the world who will say it's a stupid app (probably 99.9%), I don't see anything wrong with some encouragement from a small community. And like you observed, an app won't get traction no matter how famous the founder is if it's not good enough, so life is not exactly "unfair".
woah what's up with you people downvoting? I just pointed out what is true and wasn't even trolling. I'm offended, HN. Uber is a marketplace. Facebook is a social network. Craigslist is a marketplace. Uber's network effect works the same way Craigslist's does, and is not so much similar to Facebook's network effect.
Video is popular nowadays not because that's what users want but because that's what generates more ad revenue for media. There are certain cases where video storytelling is better than textual/visual storytelling but very rarely so. In case you have forgotten, there's this thing called "TV" that has been in the video space long before Internet came along. That didn't mean NYT had to turn themselves into CNN. I would never visit a NYT article if they start autoplaying videos on their website, for the same reason I never visit college humor anymore (they used to be a nice fun site but at certain point they started only serving videos, and nobody has time for videos)
You are correct... for now. But the way I see it all going down is only the top marketplace will survive and the rest will shut down. Sure, they may even generate revenue, but I think those that don't manage to become the top will fade away for the same reason most acquired companies die off. When that happens, there won't be any Lyft. Lyft knows this and that's why they took investment from GM, and this is why Sidecar shut down recently.
Just because something is in vogue doesn't mean it is the right answer in the long term. Their mission is NOT about generating more pageviews in the short term to rack up ad revenue but stick to being a reliable source of information. Outlets like Buzzfeed have their own place but that doesn't mean New York Times need to "adapt" to become one of those. That's the worst decision they can make. People who go to New York Times are not there because they're bored and want to read the next "what sex and the city character are you?". They are there because they want to stay on top of only what matters today, which means not everyone will appreciate it if the front page is an infinite scroll page of links. Also your opinion about their font is your opinion. I am fond of it. Lastly, there are tons of articles with embedded media, here's one: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/nyregion/bronx-school-embr...
This guy not only tells people not to YC after he applied and got rejected, but also publicly bashes someone (the LA accelerator) who did their best to help him (Doesn't matter if it didn't work out. They did their best to help their portfolio companies and this guy says it was a "gimmick") I wouldn't like to work with this guy
Medium started out with Twitter sign in, which means their early users were all Twitter "influencers". The way I look at it, it's a blogging wrapper layer built around Twitter social graph. When you sign in with your Twitter account you automatically follow everyone you follow on Twitter on Medium.
"Track record" is just a byproduct of motivated/smart people trying hard at life. Also there's no such thing as "increasing track record of successful events". You probably perceive it as such because you only learn what the media/people want you to hear. A lot of successful people kept going and going even when there was no glimmer of hope just because they believed in what they were doing, and one day they had an "overnight success". In extreme cases they never even saw their own success in their lifetime (not that I am a fan of this phenomenon).
Yes it is a public service, and that's why they need to generate more revenue if they want to provide higher quality service with their fixed budget. Money doesn't fall from the sky.
While more tunnels and trails will be convenient for a lot of people, it won't necessarily generate significantly more revenue for MTA. On the other hand if MTA invests in wifi, they will make tons more money through all the new business opportunities that arise (Imagine instead of those paper banner ads where it says "download on the appstore", or "sign up with the code 'subway'" which are basically useless since you can't really download it on the spot nor effectively trackable, you could actually download, purchase, sign up for things. Currently most people just waste their time playing candy crush and temple run but that will all change. Their ad revenue will shoot straight up). When they make more money, they can invest in other useful features you mentioned. They're not stupid. They're doing a good job.
Forbes comes in first place bar none if you compute (shadiness/brand visibility). They do all kinds of shady stuff like clickbait titles, shadiest of the shadiest ad formats, that meaningless interstitial ad, and probably whole lot more I'm not even aware of. Whenever I somehow land on one of their pages (I NEVER visit them voluntarily, it's mostly via some clickbait title I click without thinking), I always think "Just die off already if you can't figure out how to make money without alienating people who have believed in you. You're being a disgrace to what Forbes used to be and people who worked hard to build up that reputation"
I can understand your reasoning, but once you learn it you'll realize how this is exactly what you've been looking for. For starters, the main concept of Vim is its "Command mode", which is used exactly for the scripting you're talking about.
How many meaningful competing products does Xbox have? You can count with one hand. Same goes for Azure. Now think about how much competition Evernote has. There are tons in each category. Heck I can even build my own note app in an hour using Dropbox, iCloud or any other cloud storage providers (which by the way are much more stable than Evernote) Lastly I don't know what you mean by CRM and SQL (since they're a category and not exactly a product) but basically all these enterprise products from MOS were successful because they already owned a successful platform--Windows. Evernote doesn't have any successful platform and its product had too much competition with little competitive advantage.
Microsoft provided something that didn't exist at its time (the most user friendly productivity software on the largest OS platform). If you provide something that's immediately useful and there's not really much of an alternative, people will use it no matter how complex it is. Coming back to Evernote, it doesn't have a single competitive advantage and it doesn't own any platform. There are tons of simpler alternatives for each of its features. It's a different story.
What you mention indeed is a problem for its core users who already use Evernote. However "too many features"--each of which is mediocre--is a much larger problem. I remember trying to use and like Evernote multiple times through its evolution and not really sticking because there wasn't a single feature that was uniquely superior. Why use Evernote for saving to read later when Instapaper or Pocket do much better job? Why use Evernote to keep todo lists when there are tons of other Todo specific apps that do much better job? etc.
You're not alone. I think this is a serious problem for Dropbox. When people reach their quota they have the following options: 1. Pay up and upgrade; 2. Spam friends to get more credits; 3. Sign up for another service, FOR FREE. We all know what's the easiest to do.
Maybe you think everyone tries to look smart by pretending to read lots of books, but most smart people read books just because they want to learn. If you don't understand this I guess it can't be helped.
I can't think of a reason why the richest and one of the smartest men in the world would go through all that trouble just for petty "image management" (he has nothing to prove to you in terms of intellect, we all know already he's super smart. Why would he try to brag about reading lots of books? That's for losers who just want to appear "as though" they are smart) More importantly, I don't see any reason why he woudln't read these books. I've read a lot of them and learned a lot from them. Why wouldn't he want to read these?