Justin was and always will be a legend - he wrote an AOL Messsenger ad blocker and mp3 search plugin _while working at AOL_
I view it more like an instance of synchronicity, where a lot of bright young people looked at the world independently and decided that this was the space they wanted to be working on. And then when that space didn't pan out they went their separate ways, but the fact that they were bright & energetic meant that the successor projects became huge.
(I wonder if a similar effect explains the General Magic, Paypal, and Justin.TV mafias.)
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I’m sure there were great synchronicity of people working on squaring the circle in 18th century, and of people working on the philosopher stone earlier, except they were all misguided so we don’t talk about them.
Google did this to very good effect: even when I was there the first time (~2010, over a decade after founding) they still had a sterling reputation in the press, while Netscape got crushed by their arrogance (and Microsoft, relatedly) less than 5 years after founding. Microsoft too, for that matter: through the 80s they were seen as an innocuous software publisher, because the hardware was where the money was, and then in the 90s people realized hardware was a commodity and Microsoft was a monopoly.
BTW, for folks new in tech - it's amazing how influential that wave of programs were, even though they largely failed in the marketplace. Napster founder Sean Parker later became the first investor and first president of Facebook. Also involved in the wave (in a tangential way) was Mark Zuckerburg, whose Synapse Media Player got a $M+ buyout offer from Microsoft while he was still in high school. Uber founder Travis Kalanick's first two projects were Scour (a P2P filesharing app) and Red Swoosh (a P2P CDN). I met the AudioGalaxy founder while working on Google Search - he later went on to become one of the early Waymo engineers. The Kazaa founders later went on to found Skype, and we know where that went. Chord (an academic research project in distributed hash tables) was led by Robert Tappan Morris (originally famous for creating the Internet Worm of 1988), who then went on to co-found YCombinator, which owns the website you're reading this on. The gossip protocol invented & refined by Gnutella forms the basis for many cryptocurrency P2P protocols like Bitcoin & Ethereum.
There's probably several trillion dollars in market cap attributable to the intellectual descendants of a bunch of nerds who wanted to share stuff over the Internet and fuck over the RIAA, MPAA, and governments.