Fortune Favors The Bold

The social [media] contract

ninety9:

peterfeld:

There is a disturbing semi-politically correct trend around on the part of entrepreneur-sympathizers toward a balls-out “fuck feedback” (and pushback) position, embraced most obnoxiously by Scoble over Facebook and recently by MG Siegler regarding Twitter at TechCrunch:

This is just the 37 Signals Kool Aid. Problem is, it works if you want to start a small company with a focused product that returns a profit by being very well done with a clear value proposition for a limited audience (all of which grows out of a tradition of developing for Apple — the audience has a fixed upside, really, so why not be a little dogmatic. Think the Panic folks), a business model as old as the hills (or Rolls, if you will). If your margins are satisfactory at scale X, then fine. But social media is not scale X — it’s X squared or cubed. But since most SF web ‘experts’ never really did much beyond convincing themselves and the Sand Hill VC community that they were visionary, this thinking won’t change for another year or five, depending on the economy and available of VC or buyout monies. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Yeah. (Emphasis mine.)