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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

That half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users in 3 months. That is success.

Just because your definition of skills is limited to writing code does not mean having connections, being good at marketing, PR or selling has no value. It's exactly the same mentality we developers hate when idea-men want to hire us as code-monkeys to implement their perfect vision.

Reading stories on tech blogs does not mean you know how much hard work someone put into their whimsical-seeming startup. Being a celebrity certainly does not automatically imply you don't have to work hard.

And just working really really hard also does not entitle you to success. Life is unfair. Get used to it.

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I thought success was measured in dollars, not a shuttered web service.

That's exactly the issue, Kevin Rose is getting dollars for shuttering an unsuccessful web service. Why does Kevin Rose get to cash out for being a failure, simply because his name is Kevin Rose, while all the hardworking nobody engineers slave away to build successful companies without any help or millions of dollars splashing down on them for their supposed greatness which is unsupported by evidence?

It's not for you to decide. Why do NBA stars get millions of dollars for being able to throw a ball in a hoop really well?

You're implying that Kevin Rose is like an NBA superstar, but his startup didn't earn a single penny and got shuttered. How is that anything like a basketball star who throws the ball in a hoop well?

NBA superstars don't get paid purely for skill, they get paid for because they bring in crowds of people and sell merchandise. That's where the money comes from.

Acquisitions are not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, go into a business where what goes on is more like a meritocracy.

Not in the acquisitions game, and certainly not in the acquihire game.

Otherwise most startups that get bought wouldn't get bought, since most of them don't have any revenue (much less profit).

I would be surprised if it would have got many users if it hadn't got the press it did and have the Kevin Rose name attached. Of course anyone who has this power to market is going to take full advantage of it, you would be stupid not to.

What it does though is translate into a lot of people giving the app a try, that marketing isn't going to have people continue to use something if it isn't any good. Obviously it wasn't good enough to hold peoples attention, user retention or engagement must have been bad for them to shut it down.

  half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users... That is success.

No it isn't. Success is earning money and staying in business. Oink earned zero dollars and failed, so how does did this failure translate into success for Kevin Rose? Was Oink just something to add to his resume? I don't get it.

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