Yeah, I was kind of enjoying this oddball view of the universe, however much handwaving it required, until we hit the last paragraph, where the author tried to

Yeah, I was kind of enjoying this oddball view of the universe, however much handwaving it required, until we hit the last paragraph, where the author tried to address the phenomenon of startups that actually work out: It’s from among those ugly ducklings that the swans of the new age emerge: FB, Goog, Twitter, Yahoo! and others — no one wanted them at first — then they couldn’t get enough of them. There is only so much handwaving that one can get away with. "Ugly ducklings" that "no one wanted"? You just can't pretend that existing companies didn't, e.g., know that Facebook was worth serious money, pretty quickly. They offered Zuckerberg real money for Facebook. According to a book quoted by this extremely-irritatingly-formatted article at Business Insider, the buyout offers started four months after Facebook started: http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-tried-to-buy-facebook-2010-5# http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t... And Dropbox? Everyone and his brother has dreamed of buying Dropbox. The most famous rumored suitor is Apple: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-indeed-balked-at-major-acquisition-offer-from-apple/ http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-indeed-balked-at...