It's far easier to say that a business plan sucks balls and be right 90+% of the time than to get a business plan right.

In practice even the good business plans run into myriad reasons why they aren't actually good plans, they are just lucky enough and have a determined enough team to survive reality.

That's not to say there aren't good business plans, but I think that criticizing Silicon Valley culture for having a high failure rate is counter-productive to encouraging people to take necessary and potentially transformative risks. Whenever you're trying to do new stuff, a lot of retrospectively dumb stuff will get discarded along the way, and it's easy in hindsight to point at the survivors and say "why didn't all of the failures just give up sooner?" I think that underestimates how much the successful ideas only just barely avoided ending up also on the side of the road.

Meh. It's a hard balance to strike, between being poised for growth, and knowing the growth will work. It's expensive and failure-prone, but if you don't do it that way, you get passed up or hit an upper boundary.

You also hurt people in the process, and that's something that tends to fall out of the calculus.

At the end of the day, humans are pretty much the only thing that matters.

What would you prefer instead? That they not hire these 50 people at all?

I'd prefer that they adopt a sane and reasonable growth strategy that doesn't depend on pump-and-crash cycles. There's a certain pernicious idea in business in general and in startups particularly that your worth is in large part how many people are working for you (I've heard multiple people answer "hey, how are things going" with "we just hired five people!" and my blood runs cold) rather than the efficacy with which you are achieving your goals.

(I'm a little less sympathetic in the case of engineers, who are an in-demand resource and so their opportunity costs are less, but the opportunity cost of your support people is higher and the recovery from the problems that that failed explosive growth phase cause is much worse.)

Is it any worse than some lumbering giant laying people off who've been around for twenty years, because the business model of 20 years ago doesn't work anymore?

It's almost like there was some risk in starting something new...

You have literally quoted the SV mantra.

Hilariously true, since the mantra is purported to be "fail fast" and not "prop up on VC money than fail spectacularly years later when it runs out"

I honestly don't think this counts as a spectacular failure. It's not like the entire company imploded. Spectacular failure is, I dunno, like Fab.com, Color Labs, or maybe Megaupload.

The Medium situation looks a lot more like Mixpanel to me. They overhired, they are laying off. Business are actually supposed to be able to do that, in a functioning flexible labor market, and I don't see why we should vilify them specifically.