In all the cases, these startups did things that I probably would not have been willing to do. It makes me wonder how ruthless you have to be to have a successful startup.Facebook, for example, “had access to the e-mail addresses of Harvard students” and “blasted e-mails to Harvard students to let people know about the site.” The site, which allows people to list information about themselves and meet other students, largely seems driven by social interaction, dating, and self-promotion.
Similarly, MySpace “had a database of ~100M e-mail addresses” which they spammed to announce their launch. MySpace is broader than Facebook, but also largely seems driven by social interaction, dating, and self-promotion.
BitTorrent, a P2P filesharing network, launched after “[Bram] Cohen collected a batch of free porn and used it to lure beta testers“. The site soon collected “long lists of pirated content” including full length movies and pornographic material.
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