6 ms·

YouTube is not a real business (2006)

91 points by visakanv 12y ago

visakanv 12y ago
> "Let me break it down: YouTube and other video hosting sites have made it easy to pirate stuff on the web (which is where piracy started), but they shouldn’t be positioned as some revolutionary business. It’s a silly, little business that anyone could setup in a week. The fact that folks are talking about them being bought for some large amount of money by Newscorp is commical. They are a glorified FTP site with TAGS people! I could set this up in a weekend with two kids in high-school and a couple of cases of Red Bull. In fact, the first two programmers to email me with a decent resume I’ll back you guys to build a YouTube compeititor–provided you can build it in under five days." I guess the lesson here, as with all sorts of criticisms of early products– Instagram, the first iPhone, and even the Internet itself– is that it's easy to underestimate how much things can change, and how powerful a large audience can be. I'm sure I'm not being nuanced enough there (because sites with large audiences don't always keep them– Digg, MySpace). Would love to hear some smart thoughts about what we all ought to learn from this sort of thing, so that we (hopefully) don't keep making the same prediction errors over and over again! Or is it simply inescapable?
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  It's easy to forget that things change, and change tends to be exponential. What YouTube did was remove the hassle and fiction in posting videos online. It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Youtube automatically transcoded videos, it played videos in your browser inline with other content, and it was free. All you had to do was make your video small enough to upload and YouTube did the rest. You didn't have to worry about codecs, or hosting, or bandwidth Nichols, or domain registration, or any of that. Previously if you wanted to host a video online you had to optimize the encoding, pay for bandwidth, and worry about compatibility depending on encoding. Then your video would be viewed by a browser plugin, usually as a bare video. Plus there was a catch-22, if your video got too popular it would cost a ton of money to host. Youtube got rid of all that hassle, and in so doing naturally started to acquire content and users. Once the critical mass network effect kicked in then youtube became the default place to view and post any and all video content. From there it should have been obvious to anyone paying sufficient attention that the quality would only go up, the costs of bandwidth and servers would only go down and with a sufficient number of viewers that some monetization strategy or another was likely to be effective. People made similar mistakes about tons of new technologies, the commonality is often assuming that the launch state is the end state, and not square one of a massive acceleration in sophistication, features, etc.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    The other key thing with YouTube was that in the early days it delivered the video fast. There was no waiting or delay while it buffered. That wasn't the case with other video sites of the era.
    - InclinedPlane 12y ago
      Very true. Back then there were a ton of options for video. Hosted mpegs, avis, real video, quicktime, divx, etc. Most of the viral videos of the day were short enough to be downloaded in their entirety. Streaming video was usually extremely low quality with frequent interruptions for buffering. Youtube got rid of most of those problems and improved the situation with buffering by a huge margin.
  - visakanv 12y ago
    > The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Great point. Very often people when people don't understand a business, or dislike it, it seems that they reduce it to its superficial components. Eg "Uber is just private taxis", "Amazon is just an online bookseller", "Twitter is just a microblogging service". There's usually something more to it than meets the eye, if you're willing to look.
    - yla92 12y ago
      I remember people said[1] we could do the same as Dropbox by "getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs .." when the drew houston posted on HN. Not that we couldn't, just that not every user is capable to. So, look at where Dropbox is now. [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - benihana 12y ago
    >It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. It's funny how fast we forget this. Compare video game videos today to 10 years ago. Someone would make a video, spend five hours uploading it via ftp to a niche video hosting website, link me to that website from a separate forum for the game, then I'd spend 40 minutes downloading a video I'd watch twice. It's downright primitive to what we have today. And it was only a decade ago.
- anuraj 12y ago
  Video technology is one of the few deep technology plays in mass market web - sheer number of protocols and standards, securing digital video, streaming video using non QOS means catering to each and every device and bandwidth, content personalisation, ad targeting all are problems of a magnitude bigger than the mundane ones you encounter on transactional/social web. Youtube has become the golden standard of video streaming - and without Google technology and money - this would not have been possible.
- drb311 12y ago
  Well, Calacanis is much more successful than me so I'm inclinded to think that: 1. Yes, he made the wrong call on Youtube. 2. The habit of making wrong (but still reasonable) calls might be a good one. My learning from this: 1. Form a view based on the best facts and analysis available at the time. 2. Act on that view. Share it. Be confident. 3. Be ready to change your mind and not worry about having been wrong. Success is about taking enough good gambles that some pay off. Most people don't let themselves take good gambles, and the value of a few paying off more than pays for a few that don't. If it's not a gamble at all everybody will be doing it.
- raldi 12y ago
  And then people made the same "glorified ftp site" and "could make it in a weekend" comments about Dropbox.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mcintyre1994 12y ago
> SNL obviously got more from the viral nature of this promotion than anything they could ever buy. They should put every single one of the skits on the Internet for free and put an advertisement in front of them. It's incredible with hindsight that it wasn't obvious - at least not to the author - that you could monetise YouTube by becoming the place to do that.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Yeah. I remember when I used to use MySpace and Facebook simultaneously, thinking FB was kinda interesting but I much preferred MySpace (because music). Not only do things change dramatically, it's so easy to forget how things were before. At the time, Facebook (for me) was all about SuperPokes and Mafia Wars and Poker. No photos, no at-mentions, status updates and sharing news was harder, no share button.
  - davidw 12y ago
    I recall preferring Gopher pages to early WWW pages, because they were much cleaner and more organized in the terminal-based browsers I was using. It was an important lesson in my own ability to predict the future!
    - mintplant 12y ago
      All too often, they still are. I long for a modern Gopher targeted toward mobile devices and quick, lightweight navigation.
  - mullingitover 12y ago
    Back in the day, Facebook was actually a great way to share because they'd repost any RSS you fed them. I hooked it up to my del.icio.us and my tumblr. I was pretty pissed when they cut that feature off. Facebook in 2015 still can't hold a candle to flickr circa 2004 when it comes to hosting photos. In hindsight I'm actually pretty proud of my 2002 myspace page. I added some css that completely hid their gruesome UI and made it a blank slate that I filled with nice minimal design.
s_dev 12y ago
To be fair to Calacanis - who is often both wrong and right and seems to draw a lot of ire for being brash and at least hes specific and keeps the archive up. Making predictions is a hard problem. Lots of people thought MySpace was going to be the social network at the time -- the postion FB occupies now. I'm not sure why he placed so much value on Engadget - thats just a big tech blog. I don't see how he didn't see the potential in YouTube which ultimately carried Googles attempt at social networking - though unlike MySpace, YouTube didn't have a clear second at the time - DailyMotion would be the only I could think of.
- volaski 12y ago
  Engadget was one of the blogs for Weblogs, which he founded
- visakanv 12y ago
  I think one of the big lessons about prediction is– avoid dramatic predictions that something is NOT or NEVER going to happen (Internet, iPhones), and avoid predicting that something WILL totally change the world (Segways). Better to be cautious and talk about the underlying principles. (People are always going to be interested in cheaper products, faster shipping, being able to do more with less, communicating with one another, etc.) Of course, this assumes you're interested in being accurate in your predictions. Lots of people get by great with making faulty predictions, as long as they don't have to bet their own livelihoods on their predictions.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >People are always going to be interested in cheaper products Ironically this has been the constant anti-Apple motto since 2003, and it has been disproven time and again, with cheaper alternatives that would "kill" (the iBook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Air, etc) failing in the market. It's not that people don't like cheap, but it's not the be all end all, and it can't be used for certain markets that are driven by other needs (including vanity).
    - visakanv 12y ago
waterlesscloud 12y ago
Isn't the official story that YouTube still isn't profitable? If that's true, then Calacanis kinda had a point. http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...
- cloudwalking 12y ago
  "YouTube stars in Google's latest earnings call" https://fortune.com/2015/04/23/youtube-stars-in-googles-latest-earnings-call/ https://fortune.com/2015/04/23/youtube-stars-in-googles-late... Like any other business, you reinvest profit as long as your growth is accelerating.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    The alternative is to stop growing, collect profit, and pay taxes.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Same with Amazon, Shopify and other growing businesses, no? Which then begs the question of "what is a real business". In my book, as long as there are customers who are paying money and they're happy with the results, you're a real business. (Would love to hear counterpoint perspectives!)
  - yc1010 12y ago
    Some small businesses might not turn a profit per se but if the owner(s) get a descent salary each month that might make them happy, the aim is not always to optimize profits for shareholders or get venture capital...
zokier 12y ago
It is pretty indisputable that YouTube got where it is now by exploiting large-scale piratism. While I'm not fan of piratism overall, at least when it sort of communal effort it somewhat palatable. But for-profit piratism really crosses the line and imho is fairly disgusting as a business.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  So, if one extended your philosophy, that would suggest that sites like Megaupload were crossing the line? It could be argued that they were hosting pirated content for a profit.
- visakanv 12y ago
  This comment reminds me of book pirates stealing books from England [1] and publishing them in the US (which the English had been previously doing to the French): > Some (U.S. publishers) sent agents to England with orders to grab volumes from bookstalls... and ship them west by fast packet. Copy was then rushed from the dock to the composing room, presses run night and day, and books hurried to the stores or hawked in the streets like hot corn. One of the most successful pirates was the company that eventually became HarperCollins, now owned by News Corp. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/how-piracy-built-the-u-s-publishing-industry/ http://www.cnet.com/news/how-piracy-built-the-u-s-publishing...
- Retra 12y ago
  Part of me feels like the best way into a massively successful business is simply to have faster lawyers. Put cocaine in your soft drink before they make it illegal, and by the time the law gets changed, you'll already have established your customer base. There's no rule in boxing that you can't hit your opponent in the head, because there's never been a fighter strong enough to reliably kill someone by doing that once or twice. So if you can be that person first, you will be the one to change the game forever. Makes you wonder how different the future can really be.
jcoffland 12y ago
It takes skill to be that wrong.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  All it really takes to be that wrong is a willingness to express your opinion and to leave it up after it becomes embarrassing. There's plenty of posts on HN at least this wrong every day. :-)
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Cmdr Taco's take on the iPhone at /. comes to mind.
    - sukilot 12y ago
      iPod!
      - dredmorbius 12y ago
        Doh! Yes.
perdunov 12y ago
He was right, but in the wrong model of society. This is the kind of mistake a founder should always watch out for. Like, keep repeating to oneself: people are not like you, people are not like you.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Yeah. That's the classic thing to be said about all failed predictions, isn't it? They're all rigorously accurate... within the wrong models. Relatively harmless when we're armchair theorists wondering if the Apple Watch is going to take off or not, but devastating when we make projections about economies, finance, housing prices, etc. PS: Also, the "anybody can put together the same thing" argument has been used to discredit all sorts of things, hasn't it? Dropbox, Instagram... It reminds me of that joke about Modern art. "It's so simple, I could've done it." "Yeah, but you didn't."
  - Retra 12y ago
    Everything is obvious in hindsight. People actually know what heat is these days, but for most of human history, we didn't. So it's easy to imagine you could have invented a steam engine in 1400 or something. But nobody did, and there's a reason for that.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile > In the 1st century AD, Hero of Alexandria described the [aeolipile] > The aeolipile Hero described is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine
    - sukilot 12y ago
      Most inventions are imagined or prototyped by many people far in advance of a few time points when all the ingredients are ripe for large-scale execution.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  "Build something that solves a problem you have." "Work with what you know."
brosefstalin 12y ago
digg WAS the real deal... until they stupidly decided to revamp the entire site. After that, everyone bailed to reddit, despite ridiculing reddit's interface as ugly and unreadable (this was literally one of the posts that had most diggs on front page just a day or two before the interface change came into effect). I'm quite bitter about how the whole thing went down because it completely ruined reddit. As folks from Facebook began to wander outside their confines, one of the first places they usually discovered was digg. digg was like the floodgate that kept all those Facebook people away from the rest of the internet. Once the floodgate broke, they all moved to reddit. If you look at reddit today, it's a complete cesspool.
- visakanv 12y ago
  I'm interested in your perspective but some of the things you say feel a little weird to me: "folks from Facebook wandering outside their confines", "rest of the internet", "complete cesspool", "completely ruined". Could you be a little more rigorous in your statements? Are you saying that Reddit was great before Digg users migrated? What exactly do you mean by "complete cesspool?"
  - brosefstalin 12y ago
    It wasn't "great" but reddit used to be a nice place to stop by and find quality content on the front page. These days on reddit, you will find on the front page: reposts; "dank may-mays"; pictures of someone's kids, relatives or pets; celebrities who are peddling shit in exchange for the most generic answers on AMA; advertisements disguised as normal posts (e.g., subreddits of movies, tv, music); world news posted with a spin to stir outrage by government agencies hiding in military barracks of US and UK and "troll houses" in Petersburg; and other junk that's posted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is especially true with subreddits that are promoted to default status. It used to be that you could find refuge in other subreddits, but even now, as soon as word spreads of their existence, they too become saturated with the Facebook folk.
    - visakanv 12y ago
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lkrubner 12y ago
What a different era this was: "Watching DIGG, Engadget, and MySpace climb in the rankings? Those are real businesses."
- ronniemcdon 12y ago
  I'm still amazed at what happened to Digg. I miss it.
jasonmcalacanis 12y ago
What a horrible headline in 2015 -- but I stand behind it in 2006! The fact that YouTube exists today is a miracle, and you have to really give kudos to the team there, as well as Sequoia and Google, for literally saving this business. At the time I wrote this YouTube was not a real business, it was a very simple website built off copyright violations with unsustainable legal and bandwidth bills! The fact that they were forced to sell a business that is now worth $100-150b for $1.6b is a good indication for how close to the brink of destruction they were. Now, the important lessons here are: 1. Google made a sick, sick bet and won big. ------- Given that Napster, Kazaa and countless other "media sharing" services had been absolutely crushed, it is a true testament to Google's legal and leadership teams that they took this risk. It was not clear that they would win their cases, but they did. 2. Content ID was a brilliant innovation. -------- YouTube was able to calm down many a pissed off media holder when they showed them contentID: "look, we know this is your video so we will shut it down or let you claim it -- and the revenue from it -- for all time! what would you like us to do?" Think of how fucking brilliant that was? That's perhaps the biggest lesson: you can innovate your way out of legal trouble! 3. bloggers have no idea about where things are headed. -------- At the time I wrote this I was literally a nobody. I used to blog with recklessness because, well, I really didn't think people read much of what I wrote. Things have changed a bunch for me, and now that I'm older I actually pull many punches when writing about other founder's companies. the thing I regret most about this post is not me being so fabulously wrong, but the fact that I was a dick to three founders working really hard to battle impossible odds. Sorry to Chad, Steve and Jawed... sincerely. best @jason

91 points by visakanv 12y ago

> "Let me break it down: YouTube and other video hosting sites have made it easy to pirate stuff on the web (which is where piracy started), but they shouldn’t be positioned as some revolutionary business. It’s a silly, little business that anyone could setup in a week. The fact that folks are talking about them being bought for some large amount of money by Newscorp is commical. They are a glorified FTP site with TAGS people! I could set this up in a weekend with two kids in high-school and a couple of cases of Red Bull. In fact, the first two programmers to email me with a decent resume I’ll back you guys to build a YouTube compeititor–provided you can build it in under five days." I guess the lesson here, as with all sorts of criticisms of early products– Instagram, the first iPhone, and even the Internet itself– is that it's easy to underestimate how much things can change, and how powerful a large audience can be. I'm sure I'm not being nuanced enough there (because sites with large audiences don't always keep them– Digg, MySpace). Would love to hear some smart thoughts about what we all ought to learn from this sort of thing, so that we (hopefully) don't keep making the same prediction errors over and over again! Or is it simply inescapable?

InclinedPlane 12y ago
It's easy to forget that things change, and change tends to be exponential. What YouTube did was remove the hassle and fiction in posting videos online. It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Youtube automatically transcoded videos, it played videos in your browser inline with other content, and it was free. All you had to do was make your video small enough to upload and YouTube did the rest. You didn't have to worry about codecs, or hosting, or bandwidth Nichols, or domain registration, or any of that. Previously if you wanted to host a video online you had to optimize the encoding, pay for bandwidth, and worry about compatibility depending on encoding. Then your video would be viewed by a browser plugin, usually as a bare video. Plus there was a catch-22, if your video got too popular it would cost a ton of money to host. Youtube got rid of all that hassle, and in so doing naturally started to acquire content and users. Once the critical mass network effect kicked in then youtube became the default place to view and post any and all video content. From there it should have been obvious to anyone paying sufficient attention that the quality would only go up, the costs of bandwidth and servers would only go down and with a sufficient number of viewers that some monetization strategy or another was likely to be effective. People made similar mistakes about tons of new technologies, the commonality is often assuming that the launch state is the end state, and not square one of a massive acceleration in sophistication, features, etc.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  The other key thing with YouTube was that in the early days it delivered the video fast. There was no waiting or delay while it buffered. That wasn't the case with other video sites of the era.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    Very true. Back then there were a ton of options for video. Hosted mpegs, avis, real video, quicktime, divx, etc. Most of the viral videos of the day were short enough to be downloaded in their entirety. Streaming video was usually extremely low quality with frequent interruptions for buffering. Youtube got rid of most of those problems and improved the situation with buffering by a huge margin.
- visakanv 12y ago
  > The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Great point. Very often people when people don't understand a business, or dislike it, it seems that they reduce it to its superficial components. Eg "Uber is just private taxis", "Amazon is just an online bookseller", "Twitter is just a microblogging service". There's usually something more to it than meets the eye, if you're willing to look.
  - yla92 12y ago
    I remember people said[1] we could do the same as Dropbox by "getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs .." when the drew houston posted on HN. Not that we couldn't, just that not every user is capable to. So, look at where Dropbox is now. [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- benihana 12y ago
  >It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. It's funny how fast we forget this. Compare video game videos today to 10 years ago. Someone would make a video, spend five hours uploading it via ftp to a niche video hosting website, link me to that website from a separate forum for the game, then I'd spend 40 minutes downloading a video I'd watch twice. It's downright primitive to what we have today. And it was only a decade ago.
anuraj 12y ago
Video technology is one of the few deep technology plays in mass market web - sheer number of protocols and standards, securing digital video, streaming video using non QOS means catering to each and every device and bandwidth, content personalisation, ad targeting all are problems of a magnitude bigger than the mundane ones you encounter on transactional/social web. Youtube has become the golden standard of video streaming - and without Google technology and money - this would not have been possible.
drb311 12y ago
Well, Calacanis is much more successful than me so I'm inclinded to think that: 1. Yes, he made the wrong call on Youtube. 2. The habit of making wrong (but still reasonable) calls might be a good one. My learning from this: 1. Form a view based on the best facts and analysis available at the time. 2. Act on that view. Share it. Be confident. 3. Be ready to change your mind and not worry about having been wrong. Success is about taking enough good gambles that some pay off. Most people don't let themselves take good gambles, and the value of a few paying off more than pays for a few that don't. If it's not a gamble at all everybody will be doing it.
raldi 12y ago
And then people made the same "glorified ftp site" and "could make it in a weekend" comments about Dropbox.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mcintyre1994 12y ago

> SNL obviously got more from the viral nature of this promotion than anything they could ever buy. They should put every single one of the skits on the Internet for free and put an advertisement in front of them. It's incredible with hindsight that it wasn't obvious - at least not to the author - that you could monetise YouTube by becoming the place to do that.

visakanv 12y ago
Yeah. I remember when I used to use MySpace and Facebook simultaneously, thinking FB was kinda interesting but I much preferred MySpace (because music). Not only do things change dramatically, it's so easy to forget how things were before. At the time, Facebook (for me) was all about SuperPokes and Mafia Wars and Poker. No photos, no at-mentions, status updates and sharing news was harder, no share button.
- davidw 12y ago
  I recall preferring Gopher pages to early WWW pages, because they were much cleaner and more organized in the terminal-based browsers I was using. It was an important lesson in my own ability to predict the future!
  - mintplant 12y ago
    All too often, they still are. I long for a modern Gopher targeted toward mobile devices and quick, lightweight navigation.
- mullingitover 12y ago
  Back in the day, Facebook was actually a great way to share because they'd repost any RSS you fed them. I hooked it up to my del.icio.us and my tumblr. I was pretty pissed when they cut that feature off. Facebook in 2015 still can't hold a candle to flickr circa 2004 when it comes to hosting photos. In hindsight I'm actually pretty proud of my 2002 myspace page. I added some css that completely hid their gruesome UI and made it a blank slate that I filled with nice minimal design.

s_dev 12y ago

To be fair to Calacanis - who is often both wrong and right and seems to draw a lot of ire for being brash and at least hes specific and keeps the archive up. Making predictions is a hard problem. Lots of people thought MySpace was going to be the social network at the time -- the postion FB occupies now. I'm not sure why he placed so much value on Engadget - thats just a big tech blog. I don't see how he didn't see the potential in YouTube which ultimately carried Googles attempt at social networking - though unlike MySpace, YouTube didn't have a clear second at the time - DailyMotion would be the only I could think of.

volaski 12y ago
Engadget was one of the blogs for Weblogs, which he founded
visakanv 12y ago
I think one of the big lessons about prediction is– avoid dramatic predictions that something is NOT or NEVER going to happen (Internet, iPhones), and avoid predicting that something WILL totally change the world (Segways). Better to be cautious and talk about the underlying principles. (People are always going to be interested in cheaper products, faster shipping, being able to do more with less, communicating with one another, etc.) Of course, this assumes you're interested in being accurate in your predictions. Lots of people get by great with making faulty predictions, as long as they don't have to bet their own livelihoods on their predictions.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >People are always going to be interested in cheaper products Ironically this has been the constant anti-Apple motto since 2003, and it has been disproven time and again, with cheaper alternatives that would "kill" (the iBook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Air, etc) failing in the market. It's not that people don't like cheap, but it's not the be all end all, and it can't be used for certain markets that are driven by other needs (including vanity).
  - visakanv 12y ago

waterlesscloud 12y ago

Isn't the official story that YouTube still isn't profitable? If that's true, then Calacanis kinda had a point. http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967 http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...

cloudwalking 12y ago
"YouTube stars in Google's latest earnings call" https://fortune.com/2015/04/23/youtube-stars-in-googles-latest-earnings-call/ https://fortune.com/2015/04/23/youtube-stars-in-googles-late... Like any other business, you reinvest profit as long as your growth is accelerating.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  The alternative is to stop growing, collect profit, and pay taxes.
visakanv 12y ago
Same with Amazon, Shopify and other growing businesses, no? Which then begs the question of "what is a real business". In my book, as long as there are customers who are paying money and they're happy with the results, you're a real business. (Would love to hear counterpoint perspectives!)
- yc1010 12y ago
  Some small businesses might not turn a profit per se but if the owner(s) get a descent salary each month that might make them happy, the aim is not always to optimize profits for shareholders or get venture capital...

zokier 12y ago

It is pretty indisputable that YouTube got where it is now by exploiting large-scale piratism. While I'm not fan of piratism overall, at least when it sort of communal effort it somewhat palatable. But for-profit piratism really crosses the line and imho is fairly disgusting as a business.

ghshephard 12y ago
So, if one extended your philosophy, that would suggest that sites like Megaupload were crossing the line? It could be argued that they were hosting pirated content for a profit.
visakanv 12y ago
This comment reminds me of book pirates stealing books from England [1] and publishing them in the US (which the English had been previously doing to the French): > Some (U.S. publishers) sent agents to England with orders to grab volumes from bookstalls... and ship them west by fast packet. Copy was then rushed from the dock to the composing room, presses run night and day, and books hurried to the stores or hawked in the streets like hot corn. One of the most successful pirates was the company that eventually became HarperCollins, now owned by News Corp. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/how-piracy-built-the-u-s-publishing-industry/ http://www.cnet.com/news/how-piracy-built-the-u-s-publishing...
Retra 12y ago
Part of me feels like the best way into a massively successful business is simply to have faster lawyers. Put cocaine in your soft drink before they make it illegal, and by the time the law gets changed, you'll already have established your customer base. There's no rule in boxing that you can't hit your opponent in the head, because there's never been a fighter strong enough to reliably kill someone by doing that once or twice. So if you can be that person first, you will be the one to change the game forever. Makes you wonder how different the future can really be.

jcoffland 12y ago

It takes skill to be that wrong.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
All it really takes to be that wrong is a willingness to express your opinion and to leave it up after it becomes embarrassing. There's plenty of posts on HN at least this wrong every day. :-)
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Cmdr Taco's take on the iPhone at /. comes to mind.
  - sukilot 12y ago
    iPod!
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      Doh! Yes.

perdunov 12y ago

He was right, but in the wrong model of society. This is the kind of mistake a founder should always watch out for. Like, keep repeating to oneself: people are not like you, people are not like you.

visakanv 12y ago
Yeah. That's the classic thing to be said about all failed predictions, isn't it? They're all rigorously accurate... within the wrong models. Relatively harmless when we're armchair theorists wondering if the Apple Watch is going to take off or not, but devastating when we make projections about economies, finance, housing prices, etc. PS: Also, the "anybody can put together the same thing" argument has been used to discredit all sorts of things, hasn't it? Dropbox, Instagram... It reminds me of that joke about Modern art. "It's so simple, I could've done it." "Yeah, but you didn't."
- Retra 12y ago
  Everything is obvious in hindsight. People actually know what heat is these days, but for most of human history, we didn't. So it's easy to imagine you could have invented a steam engine in 1400 or something. But nobody did, and there's a reason for that.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile > In the 1st century AD, Hero of Alexandria described the [aeolipile] > The aeolipile Hero described is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine
  - sukilot 12y ago
    Most inventions are imagined or prototyped by many people far in advance of a few time points when all the ingredients are ripe for large-scale execution.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
"Build something that solves a problem you have." "Work with what you know."

brosefstalin 12y ago

digg WAS the real deal... until they stupidly decided to revamp the entire site. After that, everyone bailed to reddit, despite ridiculing reddit's interface as ugly and unreadable (this was literally one of the posts that had most diggs on front page just a day or two before the interface change came into effect). I'm quite bitter about how the whole thing went down because it completely ruined reddit. As folks from Facebook began to wander outside their confines, one of the first places they usually discovered was digg. digg was like the floodgate that kept all those Facebook people away from the rest of the internet. Once the floodgate broke, they all moved to reddit. If you look at reddit today, it's a complete cesspool.

visakanv 12y ago
I'm interested in your perspective but some of the things you say feel a little weird to me: "folks from Facebook wandering outside their confines", "rest of the internet", "complete cesspool", "completely ruined". Could you be a little more rigorous in your statements? Are you saying that Reddit was great before Digg users migrated? What exactly do you mean by "complete cesspool?"
- brosefstalin 12y ago
  It wasn't "great" but reddit used to be a nice place to stop by and find quality content on the front page. These days on reddit, you will find on the front page: reposts; "dank may-mays"; pictures of someone's kids, relatives or pets; celebrities who are peddling shit in exchange for the most generic answers on AMA; advertisements disguised as normal posts (e.g., subreddits of movies, tv, music); world news posted with a spin to stir outrage by government agencies hiding in military barracks of US and UK and "troll houses" in Petersburg; and other junk that's posted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is especially true with subreddits that are promoted to default status. It used to be that you could find refuge in other subreddits, but even now, as soon as word spreads of their existence, they too become saturated with the Facebook folk.
  - visakanv 12y ago

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lkrubner 12y ago

What a different era this was: "Watching DIGG, Engadget, and MySpace climb in the rankings? Those are real businesses."

ronniemcdon 12y ago
I'm still amazed at what happened to Digg. I miss it.

jasonmcalacanis 12y ago

What a horrible headline in 2015 -- but I stand behind it in 2006! The fact that YouTube exists today is a miracle, and you have to really give kudos to the team there, as well as Sequoia and Google, for literally saving this business. At the time I wrote this YouTube was not a real business, it was a very simple website built off copyright violations with unsustainable legal and bandwidth bills! The fact that they were forced to sell a business that is now worth $100-150b for $1.6b is a good indication for how close to the brink of destruction they were. Now, the important lessons here are: 1. Google made a sick, sick bet and won big. ------- Given that Napster, Kazaa and countless other "media sharing" services had been absolutely crushed, it is a true testament to Google's legal and leadership teams that they took this risk. It was not clear that they would win their cases, but they did. 2. Content ID was a brilliant innovation. -------- YouTube was able to calm down many a pissed off media holder when they showed them contentID: "look, we know this is your video so we will shut it down or let you claim it -- and the revenue from it -- for all time! what would you like us to do?" Think of how fucking brilliant that was? That's perhaps the biggest lesson: you can innovate your way out of legal trouble! 3. bloggers have no idea about where things are headed. -------- At the time I wrote this I was literally a nobody. I used to blog with recklessness because, well, I really didn't think people read much of what I wrote. Things have changed a bunch for me, and now that I'm older I actually pull many punches when writing about other founder's companies. the thing I regret most about this post is not me being so fabulously wrong, but the fact that I was a dick to three founders working really hard to battle impossible odds. Sorry to Chad, Steve and Jawed... sincerely. best @jason