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The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing is a big part of what makes it so interesting to me. In most aspects of life, we are trained to avoid risk and

by paul 14y ago

The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing is a big part of what makes it so interesting to me. In most aspects of life, we are trained to avoid risk and only pursue "good ideas" (e.g. try to be a lawyer, not a rock star). With startups, I get to focus on things that are probably bad ideas, but possibly great ideas. It's not for everyone, but for those of us who love chasing dreams, it can be a great adventure.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago
Peter Thiel recently talked a little about this[1] counter-intutive phenomena (that pg states as that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners): One intuition is that people do not believe in a power law distribution. They intuitively don’t believe that returns could be that uneven. So when you have an up round with a big increase in valuation, many or even most VCs tend to believe that the step up is too big and they will thus underprice it. Which is intersting, because he actually talked a little to pg about this during the class where he said it: Peter Thiel: Do Y-Combinator companies follow a power law distribution? Paul Graham: Yes. They’re very power law But Thiel was not happy just stating the phenomena, but he also states on why most people discredit it, when he talked about secrets[2]: The power law secret operates similarly. In one sense it’s a secret about finance. Startup outcomes are not evenly distributed; the follow a power law distribution. But in another sense it’s a very human secret. People are uncomfortable talking about inequality, so they either ignore it or rationalize it away. It is psychologically difficult for investors to admit that their best investment is worth more than the rest of their portfolio companies combined. So they ignore or hide that fact, and it becomes a secret. The distribution secret also has two sides to it. Distribution is much more important than people think. That makes it a business secret. But it’s a human secret too, since the people involved in distribution work very hard to hide what’s going on. Salespeople do best when people do not know they’re dealing with salespeople. [1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-7-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels... [2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-11-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels...
- martin_bech 14y ago
  That actually makes a lot of sense. Ive been having some of the same thoughts, as almost all the profits from my own portfolio is from Apple stock, even though i also own, Amazon, Tesla, Arm and so on. Perhaps thats why index investing is so succesfull, because you get the benefit of the outliers.. the bad ideas, or long shots, that suddenly skyrocket..
  - nl 14y ago
    all the profits from my own portfolio is from Apple stock, even though i also own, Amazon, Tesla, Arm and so on. No! That is different. These are public companies, and the fact you are seeing amazing share price growth from Apple is an exception. Usually[1] on the public share market you'll see growth rates of ~8% pa, with some slightly above that and some below that. The continued rapid rise in Apple's share price in exceptional, and is having an effect on your portfolio that is unlikely to be seen again in our lifetime. That is completely different to pre-A-round investing, where it is expected to see (say) 1% of companies return 1000%. TLDR; Apple is an exception. Don't think PG's essay applies to public markets. [1] "Usually" in the sense of the pre-2008 sharemarket.
    - nkurz 14y ago
      Do you have more data on this? I just did some quick searching, but couldn't find any firm numbers for what the 99th percentile return for individual public companies actually is. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000% per year at some point in the tail, if not at 1% then for the top .01 percent of companies. I'd love if you could point to a graph of the tail so I can recalibrate.
      - nl 14y ago
        Here's some links on average returns for the Dow Jones (ie, top public companies in the US): [1][2] I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000% per year at some point in the tail, if not at 1% then for the top .01 percent of companies. I'm having trouble parsing that sentence. I think you are saying that you think 1000% per year returns are normal for the top 0.1% of companies. This is absolutely not the case. Even Apple (by far the best example of rapid share price growth in a large company) might, maybe manage to increase its share price 100% this year (low of ~$374 in Nov last year, currently at ~$662). That's exceptional - companies like Standard Oil, Exxon, etc never managed that. (Occasionally you may get a smaller resource oriented company that fids oil, gold reserves or something and sees a 1000% increase. Or a small drug company that has a successful trial. These are very unusual too though, and more similar to VC investing that the typical public markets). [1] http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/average-annual-stock-market-return.html http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/average-... [2] (pdf, sorry) http://www.risadvisory.com/images/uploads/Rydex_Historical_trends.pdf http://www.risadvisory.com/images/uploads/Rydex_Historical_t...
gersh 14y ago
So, if you randomly decided which startups to invest in, would you be more successful? Can you really predict anything? If you randomly invested in 100 startups, would your returns be better than your screening process? Can you test this?
- Gustomaximus 14y ago
  They do something similar with equity trades. They get professionals and public entrants to select stocks and include a 'dartboard'. From my limited reading experience the dartboard rarely wins implying people do add value, but it would be interesting if someone could find a history (I didn't with a quick Google). In Australia one news paper includes an Astrologer which I find amusing. With start-ups I think it would be too expensive an experiment to fund.
  - diego 14y ago
    "From my limited reading experience the dartboard rarely wins implying people do add value" This is wrong. If the dartboard consistently underperformed most stockpickers (i.e. say it ranked around the 30th percentile year over year) then you could make the case that (some) people add value. If, on the other hand, the dartboard is near the mean of the distribution of outcomes, you could make a case that it's all luck.
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      The fundamental fallacy underlying the "Darts are just as good as people" is that the _entire reason_ the dartboard approach is so successful is because of the massive number of experts who have priced everything close to perfectly. No such market exists for startups - so selection is required.
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      If he had said "all people add value" I would've agreed with you Well, you could try ranking results and calculating a score based on how each person outperformed the dartboard, then calculating a score over time.
majormajor 14y ago
You mentioning rock stars make me wonder if being a scout for a record label is similar. A band that's going to define a new genre or movement will sound nothing like anything currently popular, so it seems you have to identify the things that sound nothing like what's popular but that sound like what will be popular. The returns aren't as dominated by just a few big successes, though. Although I suppose one-hit wonders are a manifestation of something similar: All the returns come from one song out of who knows how many dozens a band or artist may have come up with.
- jseliger 14y ago
  You mentioning rock stars make me wonder if being a scout for a record label is similar. A band that's going to define a new genre or movement will sound nothing like anything currently popular, so it seems you have to identify the things that sound nothing like what's popular but that sound like what will be popular. Publishers, from what I can tell, have the same problem. One thing that I'm struck by is how many novels that we now consider classic, or novelists who we now consider important, barely scraped into publication. Tolkien famously saw Lord of the Rings in print because of Rayner Unwin, the then nine-year-old (I think) son of a publisher liked LOTR. John Barth and William Goldman have both written about how close they were to pursuing other opportunities—a PhD and insurance, IIRC. A Confederacy of Dunces was only published after O'Toole killed himself. Melville's poetry was self-published IIRC. Virginia Woolf needed to start her own press. There are probably others with similar stories. Not only that, but I have to wonder who barely didn't make the cut. Given the large number of writers who skated into print, there must be at least an equally large group who "should" have, but left no marks on history sufficiently legible to trace. I think about these issues a lot for two reasons. The first is that I've had many close calls with literary agents, all of whom eventually said, "I like you, but not in that way." The second is the technological environment: now that ebooks mean self-publishing is much more pragmatic than it used to be, people who really want to publish have a means of going outside the conventional system. Some power-law-style stars have already emerged (Amanda Hocking, the 50 Shades of Grey author). Others probably will. Maybe I'll be one. But if I'm not, I don't think I'll be too bothered: I mostly want to write. Yeah, 99% of self-published books are probably un- or poorly edited dreck, but that 1% count for a lot. (A side note: I wrote about this a little more at the bottom of this post: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/links-the-time-for-novels-technology-in-universities-programming-and-writing-academia-and-more http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/links-the-time-for-...).
ohashi 14y ago
Reminds me of this: "The underlying thesis behind Andreessen Horowitz’s investing strategy is that in any given year only 15 companies will make up more than 90 percent of the returns. So it pays to get into those companies at almost any price." (Source: http://techonomy.com/2012/08/the-andreessen-horowitz-effect/ http://techonomy.com/2012/08/the-andreessen-horowitz-effect/) I guess once you figure out who the big winners are going to be, getting in is worth it at basically any cost when the returns are going to be so high. If others aren't comfortable with that much risk, you can win big because the price isn't driven up to expectation, leaving room for more profit.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tlogan 14y ago
This is probably true also for evaluating entrepreneurs where blindest is even greater (I call it "young white male syndrome"). It seems like if an entrepreneur is a little different (black, hispanic, women, little eccentric, older, etc.) he/she need to act and behave like "white young male" in order get noticed and funded. However, in that case he/she might be hiding the characteristics which will make them "rock star".
- josdewolk 14y ago
  Love to see a little race get tossed into Hacker News. Thanks for speaking up.
- AndrewNCarr 14y ago
  Ageism, racism, and sexism all in one, impressive. And what stereotypes do you attribute to that demographic which are unique and oppressive to others? Seems to me the only thing in question here is creativity and ambition.
wamatt 14y ago
> "The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing..." The hidden premise of that statement, appears to imply there exists a universal intuition to which this is "counter". I'm not sure that is completely accurate, and is perhaps more useful to think about it in terms of a bifurcated process that can roughly segment the populace into two modes of preferred intuitive operation, but possibly more. Without going into detail, both types of intuition make subconscious predictions, yet do so in markedly contrasting approaches, which may explain the root cause of arguments between a priori/a posteriori, bayesian/frequentist debates. The underlying ideologies may not necessarily be the effect of environmental upbringing as often assumed, but could instead be structurally rooted in the fundamental wiring and decision making of our cognition. I'm sure some will disagree, but I naturally find frequentist methods rather challenging to understand, and typically intuit in a distinctly bayesian manner (which is probably less common, typically VC's tend to be good pattern matchers and skilled numeracy - aka natural frequentists). Coincidentally what PG thinks is counter-intuitive (like in this article), could seem rather intuitive to some. Likewise there are almost certainly other insights that are mundane, boring obvious and intuitive to PG, yet are highly counter-intuitive (and interesting) to others. Of course it's all just anecdote and opinion for now and probably a controversial position, but hoping advancements in cognitive neuroscience research, would one day be able to test this empirically.
- lmm 14y ago
  I think you're bluffing. For someone with normal human intuitions, the reward curve of startup investing should be counterintuitive, because it's very different from all the reward curves that were available in the ancestral environment.
bambax 14y ago
Is it really that counter-intuitive, though? A sample of two "rock stars" doesn't seem to be enough to draw conclusions from it. For instance, whereas Airbnb can admittedly be seen as a questionable idea (but not outright bad), Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good. Of course, among the YC funded startups, there may be a lot of ideas that sounded bad at first; but if all those startups are in fact financially irrelevant, should they be used to try to build a theory of success? - - - It's interesting to learn that if YC funded 10x more startups they would be just as successful (and maybe more, since there could be a big success in the startups that are left out) -- it means that if the selection process rate is around 10%, YC could do without it entirely, with no significant effect to its bottom line. Also, I took this picture this summer http://i.imgur.com/B30hL.jpg http://i.imgur.com/B30hL.jpg
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good I don't think so. My first encounter with DropBox was very similar to my first encounter with Google... but it was "Oh look - another way to share files" rather than "Oh look - another search engine". Or indeed many, many people's reaction to the release of the first iPod ("Oh look - another mp3 player"). Predicting their current level of success from the point of initial investment - pretty close to impossible without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Their success depending so much on how well they executed and the smart changes of direction that those companies made along the way. (with, maybe, the exception of the iPod which was a bit more obvious for those that paid attention to iTunes) E.g. Would DropBox be anywhere close to their current position if they hadn't figured out their freemium / recommendation based model for customer acquisition?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - bambax 14y ago
    Although I predicted the iPod would fail (...!!), I strongly disagree with you about Dropbox. I dreamed about something like Dropbox before Dropbox existed; I always have had many different machines that needed to be "synchronized" by hand. I carried around hard drives, and Iomega disks and whatnot, and used "Beyond compare" to sync all of those and it was a nightmare. The recommendation model of Dropox had nothing to do with me adopting it -- I didn't receive a recommendation and didn't send any. But I was very excited when I was first able to use it, and still find it amazing.
playhard 14y ago
Brilliant. From the heart.

by paul 14y ago

DanielRibeiro 14y ago

Peter Thiel recently talked a little about this[1] counter-intutive phenomena (that pg states as that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners): One intuition is that people do not believe in a power law distribution. They intuitively don’t believe that returns could be that uneven. So when you have an up round with a big increase in valuation, many or even most VCs tend to believe that the step up is too big and they will thus underprice it. Which is intersting, because he actually talked a little to pg about this during the class where he said it: Peter Thiel: Do Y-Combinator companies follow a power law distribution? Paul Graham: Yes. They’re very power law But Thiel was not happy just stating the phenomena, but he also states on why most people discredit it, when he talked about secrets[2]: The power law secret operates similarly. In one sense it’s a secret about finance. Startup outcomes are not evenly distributed; the follow a power law distribution. But in another sense it’s a very human secret. People are uncomfortable talking about inequality, so they either ignore it or rationalize it away. It is psychologically difficult for investors to admit that their best investment is worth more than the rest of their portfolio companies combined. So they ignore or hide that fact, and it becomes a secret. The distribution secret also has two sides to it. Distribution is much more important than people think. That makes it a business secret. But it’s a human secret too, since the people involved in distribution work very hard to hide what’s going on. Salespeople do best when people do not know they’re dealing with salespeople. [1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-7-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels... [2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-11-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels...

martin_bech 14y ago
That actually makes a lot of sense. Ive been having some of the same thoughts, as almost all the profits from my own portfolio is from Apple stock, even though i also own, Amazon, Tesla, Arm and so on. Perhaps thats why index investing is so succesfull, because you get the benefit of the outliers.. the bad ideas, or long shots, that suddenly skyrocket..
- nl 14y ago
  all the profits from my own portfolio is from Apple stock, even though i also own, Amazon, Tesla, Arm and so on. No! That is different. These are public companies, and the fact you are seeing amazing share price growth from Apple is an exception. Usually[1] on the public share market you'll see growth rates of ~8% pa, with some slightly above that and some below that. The continued rapid rise in Apple's share price in exceptional, and is having an effect on your portfolio that is unlikely to be seen again in our lifetime. That is completely different to pre-A-round investing, where it is expected to see (say) 1% of companies return 1000%. TLDR; Apple is an exception. Don't think PG's essay applies to public markets. [1] "Usually" in the sense of the pre-2008 sharemarket.
  - nkurz 14y ago
    Do you have more data on this? I just did some quick searching, but couldn't find any firm numbers for what the 99th percentile return for individual public companies actually is. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000% per year at some point in the tail, if not at 1% then for the top .01 percent of companies. I'd love if you could point to a graph of the tail so I can recalibrate.
    - nl 14y ago
      Here's some links on average returns for the Dow Jones (ie, top public companies in the US): [1][2] I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000% per year at some point in the tail, if not at 1% then for the top .01 percent of companies. I'm having trouble parsing that sentence. I think you are saying that you think 1000% per year returns are normal for the top 0.1% of companies. This is absolutely not the case. Even Apple (by far the best example of rapid share price growth in a large company) might, maybe manage to increase its share price 100% this year (low of ~$374 in Nov last year, currently at ~$662). That's exceptional - companies like Standard Oil, Exxon, etc never managed that. (Occasionally you may get a smaller resource oriented company that fids oil, gold reserves or something and sees a 1000% increase. Or a small drug company that has a successful trial. These are very unusual too though, and more similar to VC investing that the typical public markets). [1] http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/average-annual-stock-market-return.html http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/average-... [2] (pdf, sorry) http://www.risadvisory.com/images/uploads/Rydex_Historical_trends.pdf http://www.risadvisory.com/images/uploads/Rydex_Historical_t...

gersh 14y ago

So, if you randomly decided which startups to invest in, would you be more successful? Can you really predict anything? If you randomly invested in 100 startups, would your returns be better than your screening process? Can you test this?

Gustomaximus 14y ago
They do something similar with equity trades. They get professionals and public entrants to select stocks and include a 'dartboard'. From my limited reading experience the dartboard rarely wins implying people do add value, but it would be interesting if someone could find a history (I didn't with a quick Google). In Australia one news paper includes an Astrologer which I find amusing. With start-ups I think it would be too expensive an experiment to fund.
- diego 14y ago
  "From my limited reading experience the dartboard rarely wins implying people do add value" This is wrong. If the dartboard consistently underperformed most stockpickers (i.e. say it ranked around the 30th percentile year over year) then you could make the case that (some) people add value. If, on the other hand, the dartboard is near the mean of the distribution of outcomes, you could make a case that it's all luck.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    The fundamental fallacy underlying the "Darts are just as good as people" is that the _entire reason_ the dartboard approach is so successful is because of the massive number of experts who have priced everything close to perfectly. No such market exists for startups - so selection is required.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    If he had said "all people add value" I would've agreed with you Well, you could try ranking results and calculating a score based on how each person outperformed the dartboard, then calculating a score over time.

majormajor 14y ago

You mentioning rock stars make me wonder if being a scout for a record label is similar. A band that's going to define a new genre or movement will sound nothing like anything currently popular, so it seems you have to identify the things that sound nothing like what's popular but that sound like what will be popular. The returns aren't as dominated by just a few big successes, though. Although I suppose one-hit wonders are a manifestation of something similar: All the returns come from one song out of who knows how many dozens a band or artist may have come up with.

jseliger 14y ago
You mentioning rock stars make me wonder if being a scout for a record label is similar. A band that's going to define a new genre or movement will sound nothing like anything currently popular, so it seems you have to identify the things that sound nothing like what's popular but that sound like what will be popular. Publishers, from what I can tell, have the same problem. One thing that I'm struck by is how many novels that we now consider classic, or novelists who we now consider important, barely scraped into publication. Tolkien famously saw Lord of the Rings in print because of Rayner Unwin, the then nine-year-old (I think) son of a publisher liked LOTR. John Barth and William Goldman have both written about how close they were to pursuing other opportunities—a PhD and insurance, IIRC. A Confederacy of Dunces was only published after O'Toole killed himself. Melville's poetry was self-published IIRC. Virginia Woolf needed to start her own press. There are probably others with similar stories. Not only that, but I have to wonder who barely didn't make the cut. Given the large number of writers who skated into print, there must be at least an equally large group who "should" have, but left no marks on history sufficiently legible to trace. I think about these issues a lot for two reasons. The first is that I've had many close calls with literary agents, all of whom eventually said, "I like you, but not in that way." The second is the technological environment: now that ebooks mean self-publishing is much more pragmatic than it used to be, people who really want to publish have a means of going outside the conventional system. Some power-law-style stars have already emerged (Amanda Hocking, the 50 Shades of Grey author). Others probably will. Maybe I'll be one. But if I'm not, I don't think I'll be too bothered: I mostly want to write. Yeah, 99% of self-published books are probably un- or poorly edited dreck, but that 1% count for a lot. (A side note: I wrote about this a little more at the bottom of this post: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/links-the-time-for-novels-technology-in-universities-programming-and-writing-academia-and-more http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/links-the-time-for-...).

ohashi 14y ago

Reminds me of this: "The underlying thesis behind Andreessen Horowitz’s investing strategy is that in any given year only 15 companies will make up more than 90 percent of the returns. So it pays to get into those companies at almost any price." (Source: http://techonomy.com/2012/08/the-andreessen-horowitz-effect/ http://techonomy.com/2012/08/the-andreessen-horowitz-effect/) I guess once you figure out who the big winners are going to be, getting in is worth it at basically any cost when the returns are going to be so high. If others aren't comfortable with that much risk, you can win big because the price isn't driven up to expectation, leaving room for more profit.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tlogan 14y ago

This is probably true also for evaluating entrepreneurs where blindest is even greater (I call it "young white male syndrome"). It seems like if an entrepreneur is a little different (black, hispanic, women, little eccentric, older, etc.) he/she need to act and behave like "white young male" in order get noticed and funded. However, in that case he/she might be hiding the characteristics which will make them "rock star".

josdewolk 14y ago
Love to see a little race get tossed into Hacker News. Thanks for speaking up.
AndrewNCarr 14y ago
Ageism, racism, and sexism all in one, impressive. And what stereotypes do you attribute to that demographic which are unique and oppressive to others? Seems to me the only thing in question here is creativity and ambition.

wamatt 14y ago

> "The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing..." The hidden premise of that statement, appears to imply there exists a universal intuition to which this is "counter". I'm not sure that is completely accurate, and is perhaps more useful to think about it in terms of a bifurcated process that can roughly segment the populace into two modes of preferred intuitive operation, but possibly more. Without going into detail, both types of intuition make subconscious predictions, yet do so in markedly contrasting approaches, which may explain the root cause of arguments between a priori/a posteriori, bayesian/frequentist debates. The underlying ideologies may not necessarily be the effect of environmental upbringing as often assumed, but could instead be structurally rooted in the fundamental wiring and decision making of our cognition. I'm sure some will disagree, but I naturally find frequentist methods rather challenging to understand, and typically intuit in a distinctly bayesian manner (which is probably less common, typically VC's tend to be good pattern matchers and skilled numeracy - aka natural frequentists). Coincidentally what PG thinks is counter-intuitive (like in this article), could seem rather intuitive to some. Likewise there are almost certainly other insights that are mundane, boring obvious and intuitive to PG, yet are highly counter-intuitive (and interesting) to others. Of course it's all just anecdote and opinion for now and probably a controversial position, but hoping advancements in cognitive neuroscience research, would one day be able to test this empirically.

lmm 14y ago
I think you're bluffing. For someone with normal human intuitions, the reward curve of startup investing should be counterintuitive, because it's very different from all the reward curves that were available in the ancestral environment.

bambax 14y ago

Is it really that counter-intuitive, though? A sample of two "rock stars" doesn't seem to be enough to draw conclusions from it. For instance, whereas Airbnb can admittedly be seen as a questionable idea (but not outright bad), Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good. Of course, among the YC funded startups, there may be a lot of ideas that sounded bad at first; but if all those startups are in fact financially irrelevant, should they be used to try to build a theory of success? - - - It's interesting to learn that if YC funded 10x more startups they would be just as successful (and maybe more, since there could be a big success in the startups that are left out) -- it means that if the selection process rate is around 10%, YC could do without it entirely, with no significant effect to its bottom line. Also, I took this picture this summer http://i.imgur.com/B30hL.jpg http://i.imgur.com/B30hL.jpg

adrianhoward 14y ago
Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good I don't think so. My first encounter with DropBox was very similar to my first encounter with Google... but it was "Oh look - another way to share files" rather than "Oh look - another search engine". Or indeed many, many people's reaction to the release of the first iPod ("Oh look - another mp3 player"). Predicting their current level of success from the point of initial investment - pretty close to impossible without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Their success depending so much on how well they executed and the smart changes of direction that those companies made along the way. (with, maybe, the exception of the iPod which was a bit more obvious for those that paid attention to iTunes) E.g. Would DropBox be anywhere close to their current position if they hadn't figured out their freemium / recommendation based model for customer acquisition?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- bambax 14y ago
  Although I predicted the iPod would fail (...!!), I strongly disagree with you about Dropbox. I dreamed about something like Dropbox before Dropbox existed; I always have had many different machines that needed to be "synchronized" by hand. I carried around hard drives, and Iomega disks and whatnot, and used "Beyond compare" to sync all of those and it was a nightmare. The recommendation model of Dropox had nothing to do with me adopting it -- I didn't receive a recommendation and didn't send any. But I was very excited when I was first able to use it, and still find it amazing.

playhard 14y ago

Brilliant. From the heart.