Obviously he's right on this, at least mostly right. The zero interest era fueled a VC-dominated boom where headcount was erroneously used as a proxy for scale

Obviously he's right on this, at least mostly right. The zero interest era fueled a VC-dominated boom where headcount was erroneously used as a proxy for scale by a lot of places. And I think the dream of a lot of people saying "let's build a better twitter" or whatever is assuming a utopian ideal where that "better twitter" is not chasing a multi-billion dollar valuation but rather trying to sustain itself for public benefit. And really, that's not crazy since Wikimedia Foundation claims 220 FTEs running one of the world's most vital services and doing so based purely on donations. That leads to other reason build a better twitter/google/facebook is so hard and that is acquiring and retaining the millions of users needed to make your platform valuable. Even a perfect product can't guarantee that will happen.