

Foul-Mouthed Blogger Ted Dziuba Tells Why Most Startups Fail (2007) - helwr
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/10/dzubia_qa#

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onan_barbarian
I like this line, although it may be a bit close to home for some:

TD: What I'm seeing now with a lot of these Web 2.0 companies is that they're
not based on technology, but on a dog-and-pony show. Under the surface,
there's nothing noteworthy going on. The majority of them are just rolling the
dice, and they know it. These are the people who will go to parties just to
suck up to Arrington and say, "Hey come look at my startup. Please plug me."
For these guys TechCrunch is going to make or break the company. If you look
at a company's traffic graph on Alexa when it hits TechCrunch, there's a huge
spike that day and then a month later it's down to almost nothing. In this
world it's all about creating the buzz. It doesn't matter about revenues or
profits. It's just about how many users you can get.

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pg
It's easy to look smart predicting startups will fail if you're judged simply
by the number of predictions you get right.

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SwellJoe
I was going to link to something similar another Paul had to say on the
subject: [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-
right-90-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-
time-and-why-id.html)

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il
Note that Dziuba quickly shut down Uncov after his startup Persai became the
very thing he mocked.

Of course, he later had a very successful exit with Milo, so he still gets the
last laugh.

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jcapote
I miss uncov

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bonzoesc
You and me both, and I don't even live in the Bay area.

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tedjdziuba
Me three.

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jdee
I love Dziuba's writing. I introduced a friend to his blog and he said 'it's
like 4chan learned how to code'.

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beaumartinez
Best bit: the image filenames. Check em and see.

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nanexcool
Should say [2007] in title.

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helwr
yeah, can't change it now

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helwr
Thanks, pg

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hung
Ted Dziuba still regularly blogs. It looks like he's switched from writing
about shitty startups to generalized shitty startup architectures. Not as fun,
but still informative: <http://teddziuba.com/>

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statictype
_Take Joost, for example [...] I'm pretty sure they're going to be well-
rewarded for it_

Funnily enough, after all the startups he's mocked, the one he really liked
ended up failing.

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revorad
I want my 5 minutes back.

