bharath

A lot of the comments seem to focus on influencing the lives of lots of users. That would pretty much cut out the entire Enterprise startup category wherein a few 1000 IT admins are enough to take a company to profitability. Of course, employees of the company end up becoming indirect users. As to what defines success, the following quote works well for me:

"When all is said and done, the journey is the reward." - Randy Komisar

Its seems that search (at least text search) is more or less a solved problem. Trying to innovate in the search space today is more or less as futile as trying to innovate in the operating systems space about 10-12 years ago. Noone really cares given that the state of the art works quite well.

Well.. its not so much the vaporware aspect of things... Succeeding in search today is all about scaling. Only the big three have what it takes to build huge data centers. A startup the size of powerset -- not really. Natural language search is something that the average search engine user would consider a "cool feature" at best. The real power of a search engine comes from its ability to cater to the long tail -- which translates to its ability to build huge data centers.

Boston based VC's turning down all those deals comes as news to me. The laser sharp focus on monetization vs. utility is quite possibly the difference between a HBS type and a stanford type.

I for one have never quite understood the whole argument with how gmail "reads" people's emails. Yes.. it does get a little spooky at times. But how much more spookier is it than Google (or for that matter any other search engine) keeping track of what you search for? Fact is, privacy is non-existent and the onus is on the end user to protect it.

In many ways, both Boston and Silicon Valley have a lot in common -- cities with character that attract likely startup founders, world class universities, a well developed VC community and so on. But they differ in a couple of ways (1) Boston is unbearably cold 6 months of the year (2) Silicon Valley has a more vibrant immigrant community. While (2) may not matter much in the case of Web related startups (for reasons that I cant really figure out, I have seen fewer immigrants gravitate towards founder positions in web based startups), the effect is more pronounced in the case of Enterprise startups. Every other enterprise startup in the Bay Area seems to have an immigrant as a co-founder -- often in the role of CTO or VP of Engg.

A great read as always. Unlike the usual PG, more inspiring than analytical.

So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate. Unless you have solid reasons to believe that the two sets of qualities are strongly correlated, I am not so sure you should be even consider using this as a metric. Having worked in Silicon Valley for some time now, I can say that some of the smartest people around here have inadequate language (and by implication -- commenting) skills. Quality of people's resumes are likely to provide a stronger indicator.