« Can Michigan Go High Tech? | Home | Built To Flip »
Cumulative Advantage and OtV
By Sarah | April 19, 2007
Just read a very interesting and thought provoking article from the NYTimes — Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? by Duncan Watts. It reminds me of the perception altering experience of reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
Techmeme points to Mathew Ingram’s great synopsis. Apparently the article has already received a lot of attention.
While reading the article, I couldn’t help but wonder — If you are a consumer internet business, does being in the valley better enable your chance of benefiting from cumulative advantage? One example that comes to mind is Yelp vs. Judy’s Book. As a huge disclosure, I work for the VC fund that invested in Yelp, and my view that Yelp is much much cooler than Judy’s Book is therefore shrouded in subjectivity. Regardless, I can’t help but think about how Yelp launched in San Francisco and became the hot thing there, whereas Judy’s Book launched in Seattle, WA. Yelp has exploded and Judy’s Book has imploded.
Check out the Alexa graph: 
If SF is consider an arbinger of cool in the consumer internet world, did this help catapult Yelp’s popularity? Or did Yelp explode purely on the basis of better (and hipper) execution than Judy’s Book?
Does anyone have an example of a consumer internet site that have been launched that are very similar but one is launched in the valley and another one somewhere else?
Topics: Uncategorized, Startups, Ideas, Strategy |
