I mean, it's also the fact that they were the first to create a hub for the most massive secular technology trend since the advent of the internet. It's almost like anything short of utter incompetence would have worked here. So as interesting as it is to hear how they did it, it's not necessarily actionable advice or the most efficient, effective, productive approach
This seems like survivorship bias. Kaggle was pretty well-positioned to do what Hugging Face is doing (and in fact, they are trying now somewhat). There's also a lot of others that tried to build a marketplace for AI models and failed.
Kaggle always was a place to conpete in data science contests to me. I never associated it with anything else. If they did sell ML models they did a horrible job letting people know about it
