From Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy — And It’s Dangerous to Hero-Worship Entrepreneurs:

People in tech repeatedly portray Silicon Valley as places where the smartest, most motivated people from around the globe are changing the world for the better, and this rhetoric has been taken up and repeated often by traditional media outlets. Unlike, say, community activists, public schoolteachers, social workers, or health care providers, technologists are ultimately focused on a small slice of the population, and they are primarily looking for ideas that will prove profitable. These entrepreneurs may have a passion for better audio streaming or e-mail, but to say that such pursuits are world-changing is a bit disingenuous.

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Don’t fully agree with Evgeny Morozov’s culture pessimism but he makes some good points in this article:

It might even help bury some of the myths spun by Silicon Valley. Wouldn’t it be nice if one day, told that Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” we would finally read between the lines and discover its true meaning: “to monetize all of the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and profitable”? With this act of subversive interpretation, we might eventually hit upon the greatest emancipatory insight of all: Letting Google organize all of the world’s information makes as much sense as letting Halliburton organize all of the world’s oil.

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Really sad, the service was awesome. But good example that building an awesome product is not enough:

While the team obsessed about perfecting the service, the founders paid less attention to the subject investors care about most: growth. […]

And so at a time when successful photo apps were attracting users by the millions, by March the company had attracted fewer than 19,000 signups. Everpix had spent almost nothing to advertise the service.

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Was one of the people interviewed by Charmaine Li from VentureVillage about relaunching a startup’s website where I talk a bit about ezeep’s relaunch.

In there, Christian Hanke from Edenspiekermann makes a good point. A web site is so much more than just a showcase of products:

In the early stages, entrepreneurs are likely to be more focused on building and refining a product rather than developing a brand identity. But as a startup begins to scale, taking a longer-term brand approach – which involves thinking in broader terms than just the product itself – is an important part of enabling product extensions and expansion to new markets, says Hanke.

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