11–20 of 188 posts
Yo's popularity entirely rides two facts: (1) it's a silly app, (2) it got a million dollars. We currently know nothing about user engagement and retention. I'd be surprised if anyone uses it for more than a few weeks.
If an app that does nothing and has a half life of 3 weeks can raise $1 million, then the industry has a problem.
The future is tricky to predict. A lot of things look like toys, until all of a sudden they're not. Worth reading the counterpoint: http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and-ridicule/ "This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer mov…
The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.
More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.
So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.
Let's build apps like Yo. They're good practice. Doing silly things that amuse oneself is a critical component of hackerdom. Let's just not fund them.
Let's fund them, let's just not acquire them. That way they won't be funded in the future :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's fund them, let's just not acquire them. That way they won't be funded in the future :)
Let's acquire them, just not for too much money. Otherwise we tell people that anything on the internets is worth billions. :)
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.