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Thank you for articulating what was behind the Mossberg phenomenon in a positive way. An anecdote: About a decade ago, I was working at a startup. The VP of Marketing got it into his head that we just had to get Mossberg to write about us and it'd be great for user acquisition. We had a bunch of meetings and shuffled and reprioritized the product roadmap around this. I'd actually not heard of Mossberg before, as my prior experience was at a BigCo selling to enterprise, a market where Mossberg was essentially irrelevant. So I went and read a few of his past columns, and felt that the quality of insights was all over the place, ranging the whole gamut from good to middling to bad. At this point I was wondering in my head "Why is this guy so special? Who crowned him this way? Why are we doing contortions to attempt to please him?" Our strategy did work, insasmuch as Mossberg wound up writing a glowing column about us. However, this did nothing to do move the needle at all with regards to user acquisition, and likely was a distraction and misallocation of resources that negatively impacted finding market fit. This left me with a bad taste about Mossberg, as clearly whatever his tastes were didn't fit the market very well. The review might have helped us if we were raising a series A or B, but we were in C territory by then, which is when investors actually look to see if you have a viable business rather than responding to hype and FOMO. In retrospect now, after reading your comment, the bad taste I felt was really about our VP of Marketing, who was chasing a prize that in the end didn't help the business. Said VP was ineffective in other ways, and this was just one symptom of his ineffectiveness. Mossberg was just playing the cards he was dealt in life effectively, and as you said, who wouldn't? |