Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Pinterest: we were cursed when we first launched!

Hu smell note: this is an individual can have entrepreneurial dreams of the era, but really when entrepreneurs roll up their sleeves to really do, entrepreneurial projects are often questioned, unpopular. Now, let's take a look at Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Pinterest, a few big brother companies have encountered a variety of shelling. From Medium, originally titled "FourBillion-DollarStartupsThatWereToldTheiraWasStupid" by Benjamin Hoffman, compiled by HuffPost.

Take a look at any TechCrunch article about Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and Pinteres, and it's littered with shell-shocked trolls. Just as all startups encounter a myriad of skepticism when they begin, dealing with criticism has become a necessary part of growing a company. Critics always think "this is not the way to run a company", and even say "the idea is stupid, childish, and doesn't make any sense except to waste time and burn investors' money".

Of course, we can't blame these critics. Honestly, when you first heard about Twitter, did you expect it to be a $20 billion company? Or, to take another example, when you saw yourself ranked 17th on a search engine founded by two students, would you have thought that in the future Yahoo was going to monopolize the market?

So all entrepreneurs, when challenged, should ask themselves again why they left their lives behind and why they are willing to take risks on these "crazy" ideas.

Just as all billion-dollar companies are born with a crazy a, so are Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and Pinterest. Each of these four companies were shell-shocked hardest hit before they reached tens of billions of tons.

1. Twitter: instead of burning money here, why don't you go throw a barbecue party?

July 15, 2006, Techcrunch published an article about the Twittero version of the banter, the critics listed 10,000 ridiculous reasons for the product, put together, put together, almost can be on this book "100,000 reasons why the stupid Twitter:

Trolls in the bushes to walk through, my favorite number! This one:

Dom: "Will never be a hit."

Notice that troll #1 uses the damning word "NEVER". Well, if you're curious and can't help but ask "Why" when you look at the unexpanded "NEVER," don't worry, there's always the next tweet to comment on.

AJ: "Uninspired and uninspired, Twitter sounds like a disaster. In comparison, I see Don't Tweet mentioned pluggd, which happens to be my favorite as well. We can follow this podcast space... People have finished interactive interfaces and the most efficient search engine in the biz."

Twitter's criticisms have never stopped, sometimes one day at a time, with one spoof comment saying:

Michael: "o is the worst version of Twitter, especially since it doesn't even have a profit model. I asked their venture capitalist - CRV (CharlesRiverVentures): 'What was the profit model a year ago', and he said: 'If I had to say a profit model, it would probably be - keep selling to richer people and saying to them --Hey, trust me, Twitter is going to be stronger'. Well, maybe that worked for Twitter in the Web 1.0 era, but in today's Web 2.0 era, such a contraption with no profit model is simply a 'stupid idea'. I don't understand why CRV didn't just throw a barbecue party and burn money, at least there would be more people at the party than on Twitter."

2. Instagram: Who can tell me a sustainable profit model

Instagram, founded by a former Google employee, was initially a location-based mobile app. Here's an Instagram release from TechCrunch (July 20, 2010):

Here's a couple of tweets to amuse us:

Shayne: "As beautiful as Instagram's filters are, do we need to dedicate an app to making our photos more interesting? photos to be more interesting? It's not even a social app for "life" and the product statement reeks of Silicon Valley marketing. I think Silicon Valley VCs should only invest in products that have a real profit model, so that the ones that do survive are profitable."

Well, that's an excellent idea, but please ask who can find a sustainable profit model, and if there is such a person let me know, and I'll thank you in advance for the VCs.

There's also some disdain for Instagram (which says it's feeling a lot of hostility from around the world):

zippydirtbag: "I heard that a certain product is worth half a million dollars with filters, anon? A certain company says it's going to make a camera plugin that offers a variety of filters, and a certain company says the product is already made."

As the comments suggest, some people are indeed making a camera plug-in with filters - a mobile plug-in called "Instagram". But I can't help but add that the majority of users find the camera plugin to be a good one.

3. Uber funding: 'Note that cars are a retail business'

And again, Uber has been the subject of a lot of bad press, and as it's grown, it's been criticized in different ways.

Here's one of the earliest TechCrunch articles I found on Uber (from July 5, 2010), when Ryan Graves was still CEO of Uber.

Here's the guy reminding us that Uber's monopoly is coming to an end (this comment was written in 2012):

"Uber, your monopoly is about to end!!!! Without even a competitor, Uber got the word quickly. But the real players are coming in, and I'm afraid Uber will soon be out of the game!"

Seven months later, another voice of criticism emerged:

Erok54: "To value car services is simply asking for trouble, because for some people, driving a car is all he lives for. Our family has been in the car business for 30 years, taking thousands of orders a year and getting 3 to 4 times EBITDA (earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization) if we're lucky. The largest limousine company in the world is carey (carey), which also has a turnover of about 300 million roles per year. However, the car industry is now almost saturated and the margins are getting lower. But I wish Uber all the happiness in the world, even though I think it's a small workshop-like business that you're subsisting on at best. But if you're going to say Uber is a tech company, let's talk about Limores (which integrates tech with car services), which has a turnover of twenty million a year, and groundtravel, which has eight million a year, both of which provide technology to their users. In case Uber has some secret weapon, but you don't expect it to be a ten billion dollar company, I'm convinced they're working blind."

Industry insider Erok54, who thinks Uber is overvalued, laid out the facts and reasoned from a cab market perspective, almost sounding like he was going to grab the phone and tell Travis (Uber co-founder and CEO) - "Cars are a retail business! ".

Another comment was much shorter:

Brucegolensteinberg: "Wow! A ride hailing company is worth eleven million dollars! Why didn't I think of that!"

Is Uber the equivalent of a ride-hailing business? Not necessarily - at least I've never taken a cab on Uber/Lyft.

4. Pinterest: a massive bookmarking system?

Pinterest was founded in March 2010. with an initial round of funding of $10 million in mid-2011, and another round of funding of $27 million completed in October of the same year, the company was valued in 2011 at around $200 million.

Comments are also getting more and more class, TechCrunch commented on Pinterest on Facebook, the article painfully said Pinterest company's idea is really stupid, the venture capitalist of this startup company has not realized that this investment is simply in the risk ah? #They're taking the money of the bloggers, but they're doing it for the managers

DarthDoccoro: "Pinterest is the dumbest site since Quora, and it's the same story that we played five years ago, but there are still VCs who want to invest in it. What a waste of money!"

VincentKinon: "Pinterest is a massive bookmarking system!"

Follow your interests and intuition

It is only today that people are discovering the planning and machinations of these four billion-dollar startups. While we can fancy flirting with them, let's not forget that in a bubble where countless startups are born every year, very few actually make it to 10 billion.

All of this tells us that we need to keep looking at our projects and reflecting on what's important to us on the road to entrepreneurship. Follow your interests, trust your instincts, and then try to practice them, and the final result will explain everything. Forget the trolls, do what you want to do, stick to your opinions and interests, and focus on your product and brand idea.