I was just arguing on Sunday with a woman trying to explain that Silicon Valley juggernauts have too much excess capital that they use to hurt innovation by creating perverse incentives and bad (or nonexistent) business models among startups. This leads to VCs to ignore businesses with utilitarian products who actually could be revenue positive at scale, invest in (and hype) businesses with dubious value-creation or revenue streams, and encourage the spaghetti-on-the-wall approach of “we must buy them before our competitor does” without a clear benefit or plan to integrate them into core businesses.

I don’t know how profitable Flip was, but considering it’s synonymous with a convenient, dependable digital camcorder, I can’t imagine they were losing that much ground to cellphones.