And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".
“Temporary Unicorn” is a valuation in the billions without profit to back that up. Tesla for example could still fail, but it’s made 100+M in profit for multiple quarters which seems like a safe objective benchmark.
> I have a few qualms with this app:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
Now that Dropbox is a unicorn (and there are dozens of other competing products, some of them unicorns in their own right), it's easy to pass this off as an obvious idea. But plenty of people at the time thought it was a bad bet.
I’ll consider DropBox successful when it is consistently profitable and cash flow positive.
Let's Plays were already an established format before Twitch's predecessor started. Indeed, Twitch was spun off its predecessor site precisely because the gaming section was overwhelmingly popular.
> Why would I trust a stranger enough to get into their car?
It wasn't until I went to college that I discovered that slugging wasn't a common thing. What's slugging? It's the commuting practice of a driver rolling up to a line of people, saying "I'm going to the Pentagon, I've got three seats; who wants to come with?" and three people peel off the line into the car.
> The Wright brothers sound a bit wonky in the head, trying to get something that heavy to fly.
The Wright brothers were the first to succeed of a large group of people attempting to build working airplanes. It was a technological race going on, and the main difficulty was actually in getting a compact engine working that could provide sufficient forward speed to produce lift. Glider technology was already decently accomplished by the time of the first powered flight, which is the milestone the Wright brothers achieved.
Sure, there are people who are early adopters of anything, including plenty of things that never pan out.
My mom certainly hadn't heard of Let's Plays in 2008, but she can name a few streamers now. To have predicted the success of Twitch is to say with a straight face that in the mid 2000s you thought that people who absolutely did not play games then (or even consider it) would regularly watch other people play games; Twitch probably has more concurrent users right now than there are people who had heard of a Let's Play before 2008[0]. To be clear, I'm not saying that you didn't predict it: I'm saying that realizing that Twitch would be as successful as it is today is uncommon.
> The Wright brothers were the first to succeed of a large group of people attempting to build working airplanes.
Agreed. However, at the time the Washington Post famously opined on the Wright brothers that "It is a fact that man can't fly". A lot of the mockery they faced is probably apocryphal at this point, but certainly many people thought that powered flight was unlikely/impossible. Similarly, many of the early adopters of transistors were laughed at because vacuum tubes were the clearly superior choice [1].
My point here isn't that no one believed; some people have done a great job of reliably picking the right horse. My point is that for many innovative ideas, more people doubt than believe. And that (with the benefit of hindsight) it's easy to imagine you knew the right horse from the beginning.
[0] https://kotaku.com/who-invented-lets-play-videos-1702390484
Starcraft already had multiple successful TV shows in South Korea. Which made it clear there was a market for people watching others play video games. As a teen I had multiple times had a room full of other kids watching me play video games so it wasn’t just a question of competitive sports. Finally, the focus was different many people had been making money for years entertaining over webcams, it’s ripe for stalker behavior.
I will agree with you on Uber though for economic and regulatory reasons. Taxi medallions where created because of the external costs of operating a Taxi so just ignoring that system seems unlikely to work. Similarly without subsides drivers and passengers are going to be willing to jump ship. That said, carpool lanes and Taxi where a thing which covers the stranger angle.
Economically CitySprinter (much earlier startup) and Uber had the same basic issue in my mind, the overhead of operating internationally needs some significant economies of scale to work out.
I believed at the time that filters was a flash in the pan gimmick that was making Instagram the fad of the day but they didn't have any deep engagement loops that would drive long term return usage after people got sick of seeing someone else's sunset with moire on it for the 200th time.
I wasn't exactly alone at the time about this either.
