<story><title>If It&apos;s Important, Don&apos;t Hack It</title><url>http://insideintercom.io/if-its-important-dont-hack-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtbigwoo</author><text>This is why the the Silicon Valley high-growth game is so strange.&lt;p&gt;In a normal company, the metrics would center around, &amp;quot;Are we making money?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What sort of things point to us making more money?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;In the SV game, it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Are we attracting attention?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What sort of things will cause us to get more attention?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbesto</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;In the SV game, it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Are we attracting attention?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What sort of things will cause us to get more attention?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not particularly strange if you break down the business models that dominate the SV ecosystem. These companies you speak of are merely procurement channels. Think of them as oil drills that suck up as many attention spans as physically possible. And largely they are all competing with each other to strike the next big oil well. Not unlike the oil industry they put massive amounts of capital into the discovery and refinement of such oil wells. The likes of Facebook, Google, etc are simply refineries who sell this attention (refined by analytics and insight) off to the Fords, Coca-Colas, etc of the world.</text></comment>
<story><title>If It&apos;s Important, Don&apos;t Hack It</title><url>http://insideintercom.io/if-its-important-dont-hack-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtbigwoo</author><text>This is why the the Silicon Valley high-growth game is so strange.&lt;p&gt;In a normal company, the metrics would center around, &amp;quot;Are we making money?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What sort of things point to us making more money?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;In the SV game, it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Are we attracting attention?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What sort of things will cause us to get more attention?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sbierwagen</author><text>It works well when we&amp;#x27;re in a bubble, as we are now. Instagram and tumblr sold for billions, neither company was even remotely profitable.</text></comment>