Two special startup types: the Twitter and the Hoverboard

I sense that we could construct an amusing zoo of subcategories here.<p>e.g.<p>The Oyster: A species of Hoverboard that appears to magically parse natural language or generic web data but which on close inspection turns out to be a slick-looking wrapper around a rat's nest of Perl regular expressions which are being frantically updated by a harried group of hackers to deal with each "edge case" as it arises.<p>The Turk: Like an Oyster, but without the regular expressions.<p>The Esperanto: A Hoverboard that promises to help non-programmers write programs by using "natural" syntax that is "just like human language". See e.g.: AppleScript.<p>The Gift-Horse Engine: A Twitter that is in fact virally popular, but only because it bribes adopters by giving away something below cost in an unsustainable way.

AirBnB in my opinion is no longer a "Twitter Startup." Maybe at first, but now they've proven people will sacrifice some level of comfort to save money, which in my opinion took a lot of gumption. This now proven disruptive model (sacrificing some comfort/certainty/social norms to save money) I think is only beginning.

I like the part where he says "if you aren't one of these types, keep calm and carry on."<p>A lot of articles seem to try and classify all startups into 2 or 3 types which is honestly pretty silly.

This is a neat, memorable way of explaining what Steve Blank calls [Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk](<a href="http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-markets-2-customermarket-risk-versus-invention-risk/" rel="nofollow">http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-markets-2-customer...</a>)

Here is Ali G pitching a hoverboard to a VC.. great stuff: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc</a> - go to 5:20 on the video.<p><pre><code> Ali G: "Its a hoverboard" (holding a skateboard with no wheels) Investor: ".. but it doesn't do that" Ali G: "Well, it doesn't do it yet. Thats where you come in - with your science"</code></pre>

<i>it’s not going to be very hard to solve the problem technically (you’d be wrong, of course, but that’s besides the point)</i><p>Actually, I would say that the problems twitter is solving <i>aren't</i> terribly difficult. Now, doing it at such a massive scale is very difficult. But I think a large portion of twitter's success is that their solution seems rather easy to implement at small scale.