[llamavore]

I think theres value in the books analysis of the early Cold Start strategies, which to me are reminiscent of the excellent blog post from Paul Graham https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

In fact you could read that and get a lot of the same value, particularly around "solving hard problems" and single-player / come for the tool, stay for the network.

But I do think his assessment that the whole thing is a paradox is true, and perhaps lends some credence to your point which is that, you kind of can't entirely engineer (or predict) success because the outcome is often different to how it started.