[kamaal]

As an Indian, I can see what pain this guy went through. Fighting the society to build a start up like this, with this kind of taboo attached to the product? All the best trying to build a start up at the first place. You are almost treated like you are doing it because you absolutely are incapable of doing anything else.

And having the gumption to fight years of laughter, isolation, mockery and ridicule to only chase what you believe in is a very different thing than just building a company. You are fighting forces that you would do anything to see you fail. And this is beyond the merit of your product.

I salute this guy for not just what he has achieved. Though the margins he achieved will be eventually matched by bigger companies.

In many ways this is like the first man climbing the Everest or first space agency going to the moon. Others have been there after the first attempt. But the people who do it first, face significant obstacles. And they inspire all of us.

[einhverfr]

I don't know that the bigger companies will achieve the success. This guy's brilliance is in grasping the same economic reality that exists behind open source software, namely that the wider dispersed ownership of the tools one uses to produce things are, the easier it is to achieve long-term success.

[StavrosK]

Yeah but I made an app to send your friends links with one less click!

[anon4]

Pshaw. I'm releasing an app tomorrow that sends your friends links unless you click. It takes -1 clicks to send a link, so I'm calling it the -1ink.

[general_failure]

Here take a billion.

[fractalb]

I also appreciate this man's efforts. But I slightly disagree with your view point. He never tried to build a startup, he just tried to solve a problem in our society. All these news about businesses and startups corrupted our mind, aren't they?

[anilgulecha]

>He never tried to build a startup, he just tried to solve a problem

Sounds exactly like a startup.

[rschmitty]

I think perhaps he is associating startups in the negative sense of "kids making an app hoping to get bought by Facebook"

[forgottenpaswrd]

I am not Indian, but from a European country, and I had lots of things in common with this person when I created my start up.

When you want to change the world, nobody understands you.

Then suddenly things start working, and everybody "just knew" what you were doing was important.

They say that you identify pioneers by the arrows in their back.