He didn't say easy startups couldn't be successful - just that Insta had to stand up to several orders of magnitude more competition than a 'hard' startup was/w

He didn't say easy startups couldn't be successful - just that Insta had to stand up to several orders of magnitude more competition than a 'hard' startup was/would have been. As a matter of survivorship bias, it would be shocking if there wasn't some surviving 'easy' photo-sharing startup. But looking at it prospectively, I think his point was: you could be fending off 9 competitors rather than 999 competitors, not knowing in advance if you're going to be the 1 survivor.