the startup world continues to exist in a bubble economy propped up by venture-capital dollars. Being clever enough to score backing continues to be seen as proof of brilliance -- and market-dominating chops. But satisfying VCs and satisfying users are often two very different things.

Er, what? Digg had users, lots of users, and they were perfectly satisfied. For a while. So were MySpace's users and Friendster's users. If Friendster had been nothing but a pile of VC money we would never have heard of them, except perhaps as the butt of jokes after a Super Bowl ad or something.

What happened to these former greats is progress. The future unfolded. New things were invented and old things fell out of fashion.

Now, one could argue that the crazy valuations were the fault of VCs. One could argue that some of the crazy decisions were the fault of VCs. One could argue that the value of a user, in dollars, is routinely being overestimated. But the users were real, and many of them were satisfied. Until something better came along.