A company is a success only if its market is the whole world, or at the very least covers the USA where most of HN's users live? That's an interesting take.

And a pretty mainstream one. One of the niceties of software is that it scales quite easily and that if it really solves an important problem, it can grow explosively all over the world, where people do have the same problem that needs solving.

Specializing in a niche corner of the market can be called a success, but a cunning dwarf is still a dwarf. For one, it lacks the necessary capital to invest into something more risky but potentially more rewarding.

A whole lot of US unicorns haven't even tried to crack markets outside the US.

That the US by itself forms an easily accessible largely single-language market is one of the reasons they do disproportionately well.

None of the listed examples were purely software. You can't build a website that store health data about patients and scale it to the whole world and its dizzying regulatory variations overnight. You can't setup a shop for second-hand electronics that serves the whole world overnight. Etc.

> Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits?

And that's fine because those companies are serving the French market first? I don't expect French people to know about Zelle or Konbini payments.

Depends on what you mean by "fine".

It is certainly not bad, but it makes no sense to pretend that they play in the same league as the global giants, or even just one level under them.

At this level of significance, countries like Thailand or Turkey can play, too. I would expect more from France, one of the heavyweights of the Western civilization and a cradle of Enlightement.

Zelle and Konbini are both also tiny dwarfs, that aren't really good examples of at-scale success, esp with anything that has any adjacency to tech.

I say this as an avid Zelle user.