If you search for them on LinkedIn, it's a small team of ~5 outside of Silicon Valley (Austin, Spain, Norway). I'm sure they're doing quite well but even if they were doing just ok it doesn't have to make billions for everyone to do ok.
This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.
Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.
We're well past 2016, but Stratechery had an opinion that Dropbox focused too much on infrastructure projects like this and would have had more success focused on improving product/market fit.
"That's why I actually find this announcement really disappointing. Apparently Dropbox has been devoting significant resources for at least two years to a project that will no doubt have a positive impact on the bottom line but a minimal impact on the top line. It's all well-and-good (and honestly impressive) to announce 500 million registered users, but the reluctance to disclose both active users and especially the number (and size) of its business customers speaks even more loudly. How might have the product and company evolved if the company had continued to rely on AWS and devoted its resources to fixing its product-market fit problem?"
The immediate catalyst was the EU, but this is likely what Apple wanted all along by launching ATT and running all its PR about privacy. Users pay instead of advertisers, and Apple gets its 30%.
I interned on Encarta one summer shortly before the fall, and 11 years ago I wrote a Quora answer about why I think it failed, which amusingly still gets upvotes: https://qr.ae/pK2pGA
The article touches a little on flight costs, but as someone who'd love to visit sometime and never has, it annoys me how flights to Guam work. Given its location most airlines don't fly direct from the mainland, so many flights to Guam are from Asia. But, you can't buy a ticket from the US with a layover in Japan from JAL or with a layover in Korea from Korean Air because any flight with a US origin to a US destination can only be sold by a US carrier. That eliminates all Asian competition and the US airlines get a monopoly even though they barely fly there and many of these flights are codeshares being operated by Asian airlines!
Berkshire's history pre-Warren isn't that noteworthy:
Berkshire is known to be one of Warren Buffett's worst investments. The Berkshire textile company agreed to sell to Warren, but broke its word and raised its asking price at the 11th hour, which pissed Warren off, so he paid more than he should have to get control of the company to get back at them, even knowing that textiles were a declining industry given offshoring. Warren eventually had to shut everything down and lost a bunch of money. Warren calls it one of his biggest investment mistakes and kept the Berkshire name for his overall investment vehicle to remind himself about that blunder, so it's a little silly to think of the modern Berkshire as a continuation of the original Berkshire.
It's possible the sketchiness is caused by a restaurant's competitors (writing negative reviews, falsely flagging positive reviews, spamming) rather than Yelp proper.
Facebook's North America revenue is around $50 a quarter per user ("ARPU"), which is ~$15/month. You'd have to charge quite a bit to clear that, given most users won't pay. (Plus 30% to pay for App Store fees.)
Reddit probably did the math and figured the churn was worth it to get everyone seeing ads. Facebook is much more optimized for ads, but optimizing Reddit's ads is probably easier than getting more people to pay. The latter would probably require paywalling more which is just as icky.
Not sure if it's the case with Shopify, but at big companies I've seen agreements with regulatory bodies and court legal holds that require the company certify that it's retained every scrap of employee data so that it's available for discovery later. The company can try to do this by uploading the entire contents of the laptop/phone to the cloud periodically, but they still don't retain 100% unless they do it once more at the very end and then hand the blank device back to the former employee. With layoffs involving thousands of partially-remote employees, that may not be logistically feasible and cheaper to just buy everyone a new device.
Examples:
(1) One reason SVB did well is it understood startups. If your startup just raised a large round and needed a small loan, you were more than good for the money, but most banks would scoff because your business didn't have a long record of profits.
(2) The "simple" thing of having a no-fee, no-minimum checking account with a convenient ATM you can use without fees is something we can take for granted in larger metro ares; in many places your local regional bank may be your only choice.