[PaulHoule]

There are certain businesses (social media) for which people believe scale is everything. If you believe that then the U.S., India and China are the markets that matter. (e.g. you don’t see a social media site from the Netherlands so Israel make it big globally)

[ramikalai]

Yeah but we don't need another social media site... Such a waste of time building more of those. I'm talking valuable businesses that add to society.

I think you can achieve "scale" in markets like Brazil which aren't as attractive but still have +200M people if you build the right thing.

And the right thing can be simple and something that has worked in markets like the US before.

[PaulHoule]

Hard to say.

The natural lifecycle of online communication services is that they burn out and get replaced rather rapidly. It seems as soon as one gets enough users to reach critical mass it is very hard to peel people away but inevitably when that happens the service stops investing in reliability, never mind new features, so maybe 5-10 years or so later people are saying: “I know you’re skeptical about trying new apps but this one really works, it is like Skype was 10 years ago…”

To look at Twitter in particular there are a lot of people who can’t seem to quit using it even when they know better.

[ramikalai]

I agree - I just think that there are far more enriching businesses to build than social media. Especially with the current business model. Not much good in that IMO

[PaulHoule]

What about https://mercadolibre.com/ ?

[ramikalai]

What about it? Solid business