That’s the nature of Valley success, however: you try ten things, based mostly on random hunches, a few key product insights, and whatever internal mythologies your culture reveres. Seven of them fail miserably, are discontinued, and are soon quietly swept under the rug of “forever today” forgetfulness. Two do OK, for more or less the reasons you thought, but they don’t blow the doors off your success metric. And one, for reasons you discover only after the fact, becomes a huge, transformational success. The amnesiac tech press weaves the narrative fallacy around the proceedings, fabricating a
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