What a silly article. I read and re-read this article but couldn't detect that it actually gave any insight at all. All the article distilled down to was "make

What a silly article. I read and re-read this article but couldn't detect that it actually gave any insight at all. All the article distilled down to was "make a startup that is successful and not one that fails". This is not something that I believe is opaque to those involved. The author finishes with the statement "The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants" which I think sums up exactly why this article is reactive rant. Speak to any merchant and they will tell you that there is one thing they care above above all else and that is customers. Those customers are hard and expensive to find and merchants desperately require scalable and efficient ways to find them. Eric Reis used to have a great piece in one of his talks in which he compared Ali G pitching his Ice Cream Glove (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs) to an advert for a blanket with sleeves. As Eric said, one of the two of those is a $50M/year company and the other is Ali G. Pitch them though and it's not immediately clear which would be which. Discovery comes from exploration and most lucrative discoveries tend to come from the most risky experimentation.