Greg Linden wonders if he’s ruthless enough to run a tech start-up. Searching the history of successful pioneers such as Facebook, MySpace, BitTorrent, YouTube, Skype, and HotOrNot, he discovered a pattern:

It appears the ideal startup will give away something that used to cost money for free (preferably copyright material and porn), use other people’s content and resources, appeal to the baser human instincts (especially vanity and sex), and spam massive e-mail lists at launch.

Sounds about right to me.