There’s this picture from more than a decade ago that still goes viral on the web every once in a while. You’ve probably seen it: it was created by the venture capitalist Andrew Parker, and it compares a few dozen startups with subsections of Craigslist. Back then, Craigslist was all things to all people online, and a generation of startups figured they could do part of the job a lot better.
Some of those companies failed — sometimes because of Craigslist! — but some also became gigantically successful. Airbnb worked because it was more search...