
How to Swallow $200M Accidentally - kornish
https://medium.com/@blakeross/how-to-swallow-200-million-accidentally-c7d8ed57e625
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LukeHoersten
Easily one of the best articles I've read on Medium or for free online in a
long time. Funny and in-depth analysis of incumbent competition with great
supporting evidence.

Other comments here on HN are about the forced analogy or verbosity of the
article but I think the point was to be entertaining and insightful. And I
think it was artfully executed.

Thanks for posting the link!

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brudgers
Medium has more variance than it used to. Early on articles, like this one,
where the author knew what they were talking about dominated. They are still
there but now that there's a plurality of articles written as early attempts
at SEO or personal branding or about discoveries from an "endless September"
of entrepreneurship, such articles are less frequent.

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nickpsecurity
I think the bigger take-away here is the connection between media
pronouncements and stock prices. It's a nice reminder that anyone with a good
lawyer and writing skills can tank a stock for a profit way too easily. I've
always been for reforms in valuation approach that reduce risk of this.
Especially given that we know companies pull crap like this sometimes to cause
that exact effect. They're always tricking us for market share or whatever.
So, why trust it by default?

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Dublum
it seems like maybe a more reasonable conclusion to draw is that the search
feature is still being tested and tweaked quietly, and as such facebook's
press office isn't hitting the gas as hard on getting it media attention as it
is on the professional services page. There isn't necessarily a 1:1
correlation between what they send out to journalists and what's reported, but
there certainly is one.

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blakeross
Facebook's PR team did zero outreach on the professional services page. It was
live for a month before a Social Media Manager at Acodez IT Solutions stumbled
on it and blogged about it.

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jredwards
What a tortured analogy

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bla2
Written by "Former Director of Product @ Facebook" \- that's how it reads.

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pdq
Yelp killer? Let me know when Facebook has a dedicated app on your smartphone
that doesn't require login which searches for businesses in a map view, with
pictures, ratings, and reviews.

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janesvilleseo
FWIW I was not logged in, actually on a brand new tablet with no Facebook
account connected to it and was able to search it.

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revelation
The content here could have fit into a single paragraph.

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mesozoic
Seems like he mostly wrote this article to insult MBAs with a straw-man
argument made up of very strange analogies.

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no_wave
Why is everyone in the article's comments sucking up to the author so hard?

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minimaxir
That's Medium in a nutshell, basically.

