It's not, though - it's a napkin-sketch analysis of where advertising budgets are spent without a whole lot of study on ROI. It's sort of a link to a dude at A16Z having an opinion, but he's just saying "look, both Dropbox and Slack are worth a lot of money." Nowhere in there is there even any discussion about what "paid marketing" is - are Facebook ads "paid marketing?" Is HARO? Is hiring a PR firm?

This is an allegation, not a fact:

One issue remains. It’s too easy to go overboard. It’s too easy to get addicted to the high of flooding the site and seeing orders pour in when it’s working well. When it’s going the other way higher costs per order lower marginal impact and decreasing effectiveness as you burn through audiences with the same creative.

I don't even really know what any of this means: it's fun paying for marketing when it works but when it doesn't work you want to buy more?

Combine that with the fact that "startups" are generally the companies that are puddling along until they can be acquired by the greater fool - it's fun to talk about product and sales but neither Adam Doolittle nor Andrew Chen really care about that. Somehow Slack projected a billion dollars in revenue for 2018 but didn't think they'd be profitable... which says a lot about what's basically a reskinning of IRC.

I pay for marketing. I don't pay for marketing that doesn't work. We've been in business like 20 months so from that perspective we're a "startup" but I guess since we've been profitable for the past ten of those (and since we aren't bringing in a billion dollars in revenue) I have no standing to question the wisdom of Silicon Valley.