Hacker News Reader

I can't believe it took them 11+ years. It felt like a recent startup.

Having an idea for a startup for 8 years != working on a startup for 8 years.

I can totally believe it- it's just that we're repeatedly sold stories about startups that get hockey stick growth two days after launch.

I remember seeing an interview with the founder of Pinterest, who was slightly annoyed at the coverage they'd been getting- they had been working on it since 2008, but everyone was talking about it as if it had just launched.

If you dig into Crunchbase, it seems like a common theme is at least two years from inception to explosion.

How many of those hockey-stick startups have actually stuck around? How many of them had their graph of Actual Time In Use fall off as sharply as their initial userbase blew up?

I mean, besides G+. </snark>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com