Aaron, I usually read your articles with some agreement, but this one, I'm afraid, I have to disagree with in spades.

Throughout its history, entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley meant finding better technology to solve a huge problem. All the garage startups you list are like that. They are still around and dominating the tech industry.

Ever since the dotcom days, on the other hand, there have been companies that for the the most part peddled a marketing first approach. These are the names you don't remember. These are the startups which are dull and boring. These are the startups that don't make a difference in the world.

Apple, Google and every other company you listed built products that surprised people, they delighted customers. Yes, there were lots of failures, but it was fine (and still is). The greatest entrepreneurs I know are not afraid of failure and happily jump into doing things that excite them, and consequently others.

I guarantee you that your approach is not going to produce any company that will surprise and delight their customers because you'll only learn to play it safe "to an audience". You'll just be feeding one blah product after another to a corpus of detached and fickle "audience". Just ask the influencers.

You also misunderstand/misquote the concept of failure. It's the microfailures that you have to learn from. The failure of your first pitch, the failure of your first prototype, the failure of your first product demo, the failure of your first customer installation, the failure of your beta testing. This is not nearly as expensive as you make it out to be. For a great company, all of these failures are handled well before they have even raised a series A. Most mediocre companies figure it out by their series C, and the bad ones never get it and eventually end up in a plastic bag in a lawyers office.

It is equally important to learn from success, which you hear less about. Things that must be replicated, messages that do work, product features that are liked, technologies that work better than others ... you have to replicate them, incorporate them into your business and make it part of your DNA.

I'd like to use your own example to see one product that the kardashians produce that actually moves the world forward the way Apple and Google did. No, they just market more junk that their "audience" will consume. Sure it has made them very rich, but such a sorry world it would be if every entrepreneur in the world was like the kardashians.