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"Will $25 million help you get five years into one?"

Can 9 women produce a baby in one month?



Because, like pregnancy, businesses can't scale with more people?

I'm as skeptical as anyone about this insane valuation, but I don't see your analogy applying here.


It's a simplification, like any analogy. It's also a version of Brooks' Law[1], in case that wasn't apparent to all.

Businesses can certainly scale with more people. But this isn't a business, and to loosely paraphrase Andy Bechtolsheim at startup school this year, throwing money at problems is lazy, you should be throwing minds at problems. $41M in the bank will almost certainly be harmful at this stage of Color's development.

Also, even $41M is not going to (noticeably) speed up the surrounding ecosystem.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookss_law


Because, like pregnancy, businesses can't scale with more people?

It is well established that certain work scales almost linearly with more people. But it is also well known that a lot of other types of work do not at all scale when you throw more people in. Usually it is intellectual tasks, like programming or turning a startup into a profitable business, that don't scale well.

Try reading the mythical man month.


It's a classic b-school aphorism. He's not really trying to defend an analogy. He's saying, "it is not necessarily true that more money will scale this faster; there are probably other limiting factors". Don't be so quick to jump on him.


People-focused businesses can scale with more people, but they're trying to get more people to use an app.

If they keep getting killed in their App Store reviews, no amount of employees or money will speed up adoption.


has nothing to do with scale, its about speeding up the future. not possible, regardless who's giving you the money.


I think the aspects of a business that don't scale are how user behavior evolves over time. It takes awhile for groups of people to try new things and figure out all the different/awesome ways to use something (Twitter and @replies, RTs, etc are one clear example).

There is some limiting rate for iteration...


I see a business opportunity here!




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