in retrospect, that’s a highly in-field specific bit of information and difficult to obtain without significant exposure—it’s probably a bad example.
for context:
friendster failed at 100m+ users—that’s several orders of magnitude more attention than the vast majority of startups ever obtain before failing, and a very unusual point to fail due to scalability problems (with that much attention, and experience scaling, scaling should really be a function of adequate funding more than anything else).
there’s a selection effect for startups, at least the ones i’ve seen so far: ones that fail to adequately scale, almost never make it into the public eye. since failing to scale is a very embarrassing bit of information to admit publicly after the fact—the info is unlikely to be publicly known unless the problem gets independently, externally, publicized, for any startup.
i’d expect any startup that makes it past the O(1m active users) point and then proceeds to noticeably be impeded by performance problems to be unusual—maybe they make it there by cleverly pivoting around their scalability problems (or otherwise dancing around them/putting them off), with the hope of buying (or getting bought) out of the problems later on.
in retrospect, that’s a highly in-field specific bit of information and difficult to obtain without significant exposure—it’s probably a bad example.
for context:
friendster failed at 100m+ users—that’s several orders of magnitude more attention than the vast majority of startups ever obtain before failing, and a very unusual point to fail due to scalability problems (with that much attention, and experience scaling, scaling should really be a function of adequate funding more than anything else).
there’s a selection effect for startups, at least the ones i’ve seen so far: ones that fail to adequately scale, almost never make it into the public eye. since failing to scale is a very embarrassing bit of information to admit publicly after the fact—the info is unlikely to be publicly known unless the problem gets independently, externally, publicized, for any startup.
i’d expect any startup that makes it past the O(1m active users) point and then proceeds to noticeably be impeded by performance problems to be unusual—maybe they make it there by cleverly pivoting around their scalability problems (or otherwise dancing around them/putting them off), with the hope of buying (or getting bought) out of the problems later on.