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Comment by niklas_a | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this post, and other pieces by Spolsky is that he creates an example out of two extremes on what really is a sliding scale.

Amazon burned through a lot of capital. B&J grew slowly during decades.

In real life, things are seldom so black and white. Every company has a unique story.

What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college kids loved it and they could benefit from outside investment to grow even faster.

Or what about DropBox that took a small seed funding round but then quickly exploded in popularity and then took more investment. Where do they fit on Spolsky's scale?

The truth is - they don't. Which makes the whole premise of the article wrong, you don't need to decide if you are Amazon or B&J. Just do what makes sense for the business you are in.

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Facebook and dropbox both have high network effects and high lock in. Once your friends are on facebook, you won't want to leave and if your not on it yet, you will want to get on.

To me, they are clearly go big or go home style companies regardless of what small investment they started with.

I couldn't agree more.

Facebook started college only and had no competition in that space, so they did well but had the luxury to expand slowly, essentially the B&J model in the article. When it was obvious the next step was to open themselves to the public at large, the social network lockin effect worked against them. Everyone at the time was using MySpace or Friendster or whatever else was popular at the time (I honestly don't remember). In order to make a dent, they had to hit hard and fast, so they took some funding and exploded out of the gate.

The point I'm trying to make is, Facebook mixed both the Amazon and the B&J model for growing a company. They did one, then the other, which really made sense for them considering the position they were in at the time.

Perhaps we choose dichotomies such as the article suggests because they serve as useful points for further discussion.

You offer many examples of companies that do not fit the two extremes of Spolsky's article. Where would you place them on the sliding scale you mention? Both have grown quickly and taken venture captial. I would place them more toward the Amazon side of the scale.

Very little in the world is black or white. Conflict and disagreement happens quite often. What you do about conflict and disagreement is the important part.

"""The problem with this post, and other pieces by Spolsky is that he creates an example out of two extremes on what really is a sliding scale. Amazon burned through a lot of capital. B&J grew slowly during decades. In real life, things are seldom so black and white."""

Maybe, but shades of gray are neither guiding principles nor reference points.

We measure shades of gray as 10% white or 20% black etc, i.e distances from the extreme, not with reference to other shades of gray or as an absolute gray value. (Even if we could enumerate enough sub-segments on the "sliding slice", we still intuitively understand segment 4/10 to mean something like: 4/10 close to white, 6/10 close to black).

"Every company has a unique story" is another way of saying: I cannot understand and generalize anything specific about how companies operate. Not very helpful. Science works with generalization and taxonomy.

"""What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college kids loved it and they could benefit from outside investment to grow even faster."""

Then they went towards the white end of the scale first, the black later.

"Science works with generalization and taxonomy."

You still need to do the science though. Taking two examples and drawing general conclusions from that is just wrong. It's a case study of how B&J and Amazon have operated, which in itself is interesting.

But it's wrong to state that you either are a B&J-type company or an Amazon-type company, nothing in the article supports the fact that those are the only possible types.

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