
This For That  - btrautsc
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2014/01/this-for-that.html
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pg
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866938)

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brandonhsiao
He's talking about startups that try to be x for y for no reason besides that
x and y are in fashion. His two counterexamples support your point.

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tptacek
No he's not. He doesn't talk about that subset of the "this for thats" until
the last graf of the article. The balance of the article is spent explaining
the concept of "this for that", suggesting that "this for thats" have a harder
time getting funded, and acknowledging that several USV investments can easily
be described as "this for thats".

I found the article hard to follow, not least because it's hard to find a
startup that can't be described as "this for that". Every startup is "for"
something. And very few startups are _sui generis_.

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brandonhsiao
Only the fourth paragraph talks about what you just mentioned. From the other
paragraphs my takeaway was that startups have to start at a problem, and then
happen to make something that can retrospectively be described as x for y,
like Edmodo's and SoundCloud's founders did. This as opposed to trying to be x
for y just because x or y is hot.

I'm not saying the article was good, just pointing out what it said.

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bryanlarsen
If "this for that" is the raison d'etre of the startup, that's a red flag.

Most of the time it's just the best way of describing a startup in 3 words or
so. Our startup, [http://clara.io/](http://clara.io/), is "google docs for 3D
animation". It's not a great explanation of what we do or why, but it's about
as good as you can get in a very short sentence.

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m52go
The something of somewhere is the nothing of nowhere - Peter Thiel

