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Foul-Mouthed Blogger Ted Dziuba Tells Why Most Startups Fail (2007)
- onan_barbarian 16y agoI like this line, although it may be a bit close to home for some: TD: What I'm seeing now with a lot of these Web 2.0 companies is that they're not based on technology, but on a dog-and-pony show. Under the surface, there's nothing noteworthy going on. The majority of them are just rolling the dice, and they know it. These are the people who will go to parties just to suck up to Arrington and say, "Hey come look at my startup. Please plug me." For these guys TechCrunch is going to make or break the company. If you look at a company's traffic graph on Alexa when it hits TechCrunch, there's a huge spike that day and then a month later it's down to almost nothing. In this world it's all about creating the buzz. It doesn't matter about revenues or profits. It's just about how many users you can get.
- Montagist 16y agoI agree with him, except it's more like a social league where everyone plays because they accept any and everyone. I've mentioned it here before, but I think it's plain silly that now - after all the publicity and hype - damn near everyone thinks they can make a startup without actually having the skill to build, much less a reasonable idea. Was reading a post on here previously about a startup that needs a developer to [make an api] for their site so users can customize their product - a magnetic bumper sticker holder thing with changeable messages. Come on dudes, really? An api? You need a printer and a pair of scissors. Was gonna say that I hope I one day have a startup this guy bashes, but then I saw the date on this post.
- nanexcool 16y agoShould say [2007] in title.
- il 16y agoNote that Dziuba quickly shut down Uncov after his startup Persai became the very thing he mocked. Of course, he later had a very successful exit with Milo, so he still gets the last laugh.
- jcapote 16y agoI miss uncov
- bonzoesc 16y agoYou and me both, and I don't even live in the Bay area.
- tedjdziuba 16y agoMe three.
- pg 16y agoIt's easy to look smart predicting startups will fail if you're judged simply by the number of predictions you get right.
- SwellJoe 16y agoI was going to link to something similar another Paul had to say on the subject: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-time-and-why-id.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jdee 16y agoI love Dziuba's writing. I introduced a friend to his blog and he said 'it's like 4chan learned how to code'.
- beaumartinez 16y agoBest bit: the image filenames. Check em and see.
- revorad 16y agoI want my 5 minutes back.
- statictype 16y agoTake Joost, for example [...] I'm pretty sure they're going to be well-rewarded for it Funnily enough, after all the startups he's mocked, the one he really liked ended up failing.
- hung 16y agoTed Dziuba still regularly blogs. It looks like he's switched from writing about shitty startups to generalized shitty startup architectures. Not as fun, but still informative: http://teddziuba.com/ http://teddziuba.com/