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