In short, the article says do these 3 things or fail...

1. have fun 2. differentiate from competition 3. nurture employees

The title of the article is over dramatic. There are lots of examples of businesses that don't do any of the above and yet they still turn a profit. Even then, you can do all 3 and still fail.

Solid advice nonetheless, just have to take it with a grain of salt.

It's less advice and more PR.

I would say 0 advice and 100% PR.

The PR department who runs the blog thought would be cool to have some Richard Branson words there. So they sent up an email asking Mr. Branson to write a short advice post. He started writing easy stories he use to share every other interview or lecture, and create a title to make his particular case sounds like a general advice.

The blog guy thinks it is still necessary to put a little more context to make it sound like cool, wise advice. So he writes an intro that resonate with founders. That's it. Out of the microwave advice to generate traffic.

For me, not a single word of value for my startup management. The HN upvotes tricked me. Just some curiosities about how Richard Branson do business.

Specifically, it's PR for nice lounges.

Maybe YC can found LoungeBase[tm] - my new start-up which offers lounge services for customers of other startups.

More seriously, I read Branson's autobiog recently. He likes taking chances, but if he hadn't had family resources to fall back on when starting out he would have been in jail.

So that helped too.

Standard rah rah startup advice.

Three things your start up is probably already doing, plus some pictures and stories that make Richard Bronson seem like some kind of visionary.

Pretty smart, and should be common sense. Retain your customers and talent by building strong and meaningful relationships with both. It's telling that this sort of shit is now practically rocket science for people who think they've found some new way to build businesses that work (using disruptive big data bump apps in the cloud or some horseshit).

I'd re-write these slightly:

1. Know your users. If you understand what they want, you can provide value or fun, and they'll both be well-recieved.

2. Know the problem you're solving. Starbucks was solving the problem of creating a "3rd space", and they monetized with coffee.

3. Nurture employees, I'd keep the same.

I've never heard that about Starbucks - I'm genuinely curious to know more. Do you have any recommended reading?

"Here's a record store... with a lounge." - success

"Here's an airline... with a lounge." - success

"Here's a bank... wait for it...... with a lounge." - success

We had a billionaire in India who followed his foot steps now he is pauper. His airline went bust and he had sell his beer factory.

One question for HN moderators: Is flag the same as downvote?

For example, I think this is useless PR stuff, not interesting in any manner. So should I flag it like I would downvote a comment?

Or flag is mostly for more harmful things suchs as spammy or innacurate posts; and I should just hope less people upvote it and its buried?

You should flag a story if you think it's off-topic for HN, i.e. you think it shouldn't be here. Since useless PR stuff shouldn't be here, that's definitely a legit reason to flag a story.

thanks!

Area number one: not ending headlines with prepositions.

That "don't end sentences with a preposition" thing hasn't been a widely accepted rule of English for decades now. Why are you fighting a hopeless battle?

And Churchill didn't even say the funniest line about it.

Why not? (serious question from a non-native english speaker)

The Latinate syntactical construction norms that moved over to English included, among many others, one around prepositions (from the Latin prae, meaning before) being placed before the object with which it is linked, never after.

It certainly isn't a rule, per se; and ending a sentence with a preposition is not wrong. But it is stylistically less desirable.

Dryden hated that Ben Jonson occasionally ended sentences with prepositions. He gave the norm added power and it has lasted, since his 1672 criticism, another 250 years. Dryden never said that ending a sentence with a preposition was wrong, only that it was ugly.

(Incidentally, Winston Churchill never said that this was a grammar rule "up with which I will not put." See: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001715.h...)

There's a decent discussion here with a variety of perspectives:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16/when-is-it-app...

My first thought...