How is it a widely-held theory? It hasn't stood up to scrutiny, at least any well documented tests.
It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.
Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.
Within the bounds of that article, the author's points are fairly valid. I mean he hasn't emphasized piggybacking as the one ring to rule them all.
For a new startup these are good lessons to learn from. Of course, there is always a danger in building your business atop a competitor platform but if your timing and execution is such that the parent platform can't outdo you right away you can do a decent amount of business.
Off topic, but did they get an engineer to write the content? "Thanks to its world-renowned, tri-core, wafer thin CPU with full chocolate coverage." If this is intentional sarcasm it is tasteless (pun intended)
The only reason people don't exercise is because they don't. I don't know of a genuine reason to not be able to spare 20 minutes a day. If you can do nothing else, run for 10 minutes and do 50 push ups, that's all it takes.
Besides the fact that the author is clearly an 'API-go-to-guy' (ex-Twilio, ex-IFTTT so I'm sure he knows his stuff!) I wonder if this is also because of the ecosystem which is OK with betting on the confidence of the founder.