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> Facebook would have some real competition today if they hadn’t sold it. Would they? Why do you assume that they’d be able to grow to their current levels wit

> Facebook would have some real competition today if they hadn’t sold it. Would they? Why do you assume that they’d be able to grow to their current levels without Facebook money, engineering and know how? Building, growing and sustaining big social network is truly challenging, as we can see by how few companies were able to do it successfully. Even companies with bottomless pockets like Google failed at it spectacularly.

throwaway2048 6y ago
adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity, they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  > adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity Then why did Google fail? > they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition. They had few million users - that’s pretty good, but far far for being really successful. Everyone (including me) thought that Facebook was crazy for spending one billion on some random hipster photo app.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Technical talent is necessary but not sufficient. You need other things: a niche that hasn’t already been taken over due to network effects, the right design to address that market, possibly the marketing chops to get the ball rolling. Sometimes you can try to tilt the playing field by exploiting advantages that you have. That is not a guarantee of success either. Technical talent is plentiful in Silicon Valley as long as you have the secret ingredient, stock options actually worth a lot of money. Google+ bungled the very first part, the need they were serving. It is somewhat common for tech giants to hire renowned technical experts whether in design, engineering, etc but totally bungle the very first part. Just throw money at these experts and they will suddenly appear. As you can see, money isn’t much of an advantage tech giants have against fast growing upstarts, especially with valuations of high growth tech companies.
HDMI_Cable 6y ago
Didn't they already have a large market share before selling to Facebook? They might not have grown as quickly, but considering that they had a foot in the door, and people were already considering Facebook to be the "old-person" social media, they might have done well otherwise.

throwaway2048 6y ago

adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity, they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.

justapassenger 6y ago
> adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity Then why did Google fail? > they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition. They had few million users - that’s pretty good, but far far for being really successful. Everyone (including me) thought that Facebook was crazy for spending one billion on some random hipster photo app.
- babesh 6y ago
  Technical talent is necessary but not sufficient. You need other things: a niche that hasn’t already been taken over due to network effects, the right design to address that market, possibly the marketing chops to get the ball rolling. Sometimes you can try to tilt the playing field by exploiting advantages that you have. That is not a guarantee of success either. Technical talent is plentiful in Silicon Valley as long as you have the secret ingredient, stock options actually worth a lot of money. Google+ bungled the very first part, the need they were serving. It is somewhat common for tech giants to hire renowned technical experts whether in design, engineering, etc but totally bungle the very first part. Just throw money at these experts and they will suddenly appear. As you can see, money isn’t much of an advantage tech giants have against fast growing upstarts, especially with valuations of high growth tech companies.

HDMI_Cable 6y ago

Didn't they already have a large market share before selling to Facebook? They might not have grown as quickly, but considering that they had a foot in the door, and people were already considering Facebook to be the "old-person" social media, they might have done well otherwise.