I highly recommend the whole book. The biggest danger with this line of thinking is picking a straw man version of what everyone else believes. Or of underesti

I highly recommend the whole book. The biggest danger with this line of thinking is picking a straw man version of what everyone else believes. Or of underestimating the difference between belief and execution. In this case, few sophisticated investors truly believed that page views were the ultimate metric. But those were one of the few publicly available metrics you could compare between websites. Their problem was in execution (getting better engagement and monetization metrics) rather than mistaken beliefs. Straw men are common in startup pitches: "Our software will be powerful and easy to use", as if their competitors had a different goal. So before proceeding on the assumption that everyone else believes something silly, think hard about reasons why it might only appear that way.