When you're looking at templates for success, then looking at the successful companies (survivorship bias) is a good start.
The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful. This is the problem with all those blog posts examining the daily habits of highly successful people (like, they wake up early, or, they eat energy bars to save time, etc). Clearly, just doing these things won't make you a billionaire.
For what I wrote, I believe this doesn't apply, because of the stark difference between the culture I experienced at FB and other companies. (Admittedly, this is not a stat.sign. sample.) So in my experience it's _not_ true that other companies are doing the same thing...
Having said that, you're right that FB is a one in a million company, and probably nobody reading this will be the next M.Zuckerberg... But still, if you want to be the best in your domain (eg. best todo app), I strongly think these are good patterns to follow.
The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful.
Well, there is no shortage of web startups trying to be all agile and fast-moving that still fail, and among the ones that survive long enough to become established, there seem to be plenty of problems with reliability and security issues that better software design might have avoided.
Facebook seem to have significant problems quite often too. I've seen teams redistribute their planned Facebook spending for entire ad campaigns across other channels, because the Facebook UI for setting up the ads was so broken on that day that it was impossible to run the intended FB campaign, or because FB's approval system for promotional content rejected something for obviously incorrect reasons. In one case, FB made a rookie mistake in their payment processing that stopped everything to do with Facebook ads dead for that business until the problem could be resolved, which itself was only possible because of some personal contacts who happened to work at Facebook and could escalate the issue internally.
The thing is, if you're Facebook, you can survive repeatedly causing this sort of hassle for the people paying your bills, because you're big enough that they'll probably come back and try again another time anyway. It's still x% of your potential revenue that you're throwing away, but you don't need that revenue to remain a viable business. However, if you're almost anyone other than Facebook, those kinds of quality control issues will damage your reputation and ultimately sink your business if they become serious enough.
The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful. This is the problem with all those blog posts examining the daily habits of highly successful people (like, they wake up early, or, they eat energy bars to save time, etc). Clearly, just doing these things won't make you a billionaire.
For what I wrote, I believe this doesn't apply, because of the stark difference between the culture I experienced at FB and other companies. (Admittedly, this is not a stat.sign. sample.) So in my experience it's _not_ true that other companies are doing the same thing...
Having said that, you're right that FB is a one in a million company, and probably nobody reading this will be the next M.Zuckerberg... But still, if you want to be the best in your domain (eg. best todo app), I strongly think these are good patterns to follow.