Well, i may have badly phrased that. The success of your business does indeed rely on a very big number of things, and it's multi factorial. Also, your business

Well, i may have badly phrased that. The success of your business does indeed rely on a very big number of things, and it's multi factorial. Also, your business can fail for multiple reasons. Also, "original" was certainly not accurate, the current idea and orientation of the business is well enough, you're totally right about that. But there is still some truth in what i say, in that , if your original idea doesn't appeal to a lot of people, you're not gonna have any success. Your site concept is the foundation, and SO concept is a very good one. >"I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea" I never made that claim, implicitly or explicitly, that's just your paranoïa speaking. Quite the contrary, i believe Jeff deserves full credit for what he did, and for his ideas. I also truely believe Jeff to be a very intelligent human being. This is unrelated to the fact that i really think his technical level is quite low on everything programming related, at least in what he shows on his blog. That combined with the very blunt displays he makes of his claims is probably the source of all the "hate" you see on technically oriented sites like HN. This is not to say Jeff is a bad programmer. All you can deduce from his blog is that he likes to banter about things he doesn't truly know. The fact that he's ignorant of some things doesn't set him appart - we all ignore much more than we know - the fact that he talks about it like an expert does .