This might provoke strong responses from hacker / programmer crowd, but...

Relatively speaking, building a small team of capable engineers is much easier than getting a business, especially in a competitive space like TODO lists, to 13+ million users (their numbers in 2015 at the time of Microsoft acquisition).

I don’t know why this should be controversial. Plenty of good products fail and shoddy ones succeed. It’s clear engineering merit is not the primary factor in success.

I find the complete 180 to be true. Very easy to get a business into a competitive space, but it’s hard to build a capable team of engineers. If you have both money and a solid idea to generating revenue (business plan) then you have solved both problems easily, relatively speaking. Engineers come together with the universal language.. money. Something startups don’t have.

They said getting a business to 13million+ users, not getting a business into a competitive space alone. The point is the users are where the money is and getting to that many users is the most difficult part, neither gathering a group of engineers nor entering a competitive space.

Like Lyft? Throw money at customers and they come flocking. Same with engineers. It’s making that model profitable that’s the hard spot

I think it speaks to how companies buy teams not products most of the time, and it's often tragic for the app itself.

Or alternatively, they buy a competitor to sink it before they become too powerful or falls in the hands of another larger competitor.

Wunderlist the app was never a great example of technical prowess. From the first day it just was marketing and simplicity.

Today they likely would start from scratch anyway, the old app is now decade old or so. The real worth is all in the brand. Bringing back a somewhat beloved app, innovate it a bit here and there, this will bring them some attention and money, maybe enough to sell it again some years in the future.

I think he is quite focused on Pitch at the moment to start from scratch.