purp

I believe I understand your perspective. I think you're saying that "Betting The Company" == "Taking Mortal Risk", and I agree with that definition.

I don't agree that the odds are fixed, nor that it's all-or-nothing-to-the-end. For any startup, you take mortal risk as infrequently as you can; you hedge those bets as much as you can; and, since you can invest effort to change the game in reaction to the market, you work to improve your odds over time.

So in the end, I believe you present a false dichotomy. It's rarely $100MM or death, and there's never a guaranteed outcome.

Yep. It was clever of us to invest months of engineering time on this while also arranging for the Apple/Adobe schism to continue to worsen, and talk Steve Jobs into posting his thoughts at just the right time to frame our launch.

We're just that amazing. ;]

That was the point Andrew was making with his post, I think.

Really? It's always seemed to me that Facebook wants to own your address book and inbox, while Twitter wants to own real time news/search/intentions. But maybe that's just what you said from a different perspective.