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Warning to companies that market themselves as messiahs

news.ycombinator.com

1–4 of 4 posts

Warning to companies that market themselves as messiahs

#1
Sometimes I see startups waxing lyrical about how they're helping the little guy by sticking it to the big corporates / the boomers / the Government / the [insert hated flavour of the month]. It's almost the equivalent of the modern company .

If this is you, hear me out.

Any time you market yourself as a messiah, or as someone fighting for the little person against the tyranny of someone else, you inevitably put yourself on a pedestal (how high will depend on how far you're able to push that message).

If you can stay up there, good for you...but it can be a long fall from the top if things go awry.

I wrote a post here recapping the Gamestop saga and how the app Robinhood went from the people's champion to their whipping boy: https://thisweekintech.substack.com/p/robinhood-men-in-headbands

It's a long read, but I'm hoping it'll make us all think twice about our messaging (note: I don't mean mission - that can, and should be, as lofty as you like).

Re: Warning to companies that market themselves as messiahs

#4
Theranos is the most extreme example of blowing up the hype to biblical proportions while producing absolutely nothing and while the company is now defunct, Holmes was a billionaire for years. She got a lot out of it.

IBKR banned trading Gamestop. It did almost nothing to IBKR stock and it's currently at a near ATH.

TWTR took a plunge after purging accounts including Trump's, but is now at a 5 year high.

Before there was ubiquitous internet access, a scandal could terminate a company. News Of The World went out of business after hacking people's phones and engaging in other unsavory practices.

But a lot of these global internet companies 1) have a potential market of up to billions of users 2) are quasi-utility companies in that they provide more or less essential services (communication, search, payments, investing). They are almost to big too fail and the Gamestop incident will probably be a nothingburger in the greater scheme of things.