It's fantastically useful as a touch point. It's a point that, retrospectively, the road forked and it changed who we are and what we do, and sort of defined ou

It's fantastically useful as a touch point. It's a point that, retrospectively, the road forked and it changed who we are and what we do, and sort of defined our values. We compare ourselves, and our competitors, to the theoretical company we could've been fairly frequently. As for the advice even if it was shocking at the time it doesn't seem that scary these days. It does seem a little prescient. The big one was to ditch our largest supplier, Amazon Mechanical Turk, build it ourselves and compete with them, as our success would be limited by them. This wasn't something we were willing to do at the time, we viewed them handling those problems as a major leg up for us. However in the end much of this was correct and building our own (more limited version) was part of us being financially successful as a company. Most of the advice consisted of start up tropes, applied to our particular business. They basically told us to dream audacious dreams, do difficult things that don't scale to boot strap and build relationships while doing it. But they didn't use any of those words and did apply them specifically to our problems which was pretty helpful. But the real value was as a touchstone, and illustrating how far ahead people who are good at this can see