Forgive the late follow-up, but my first startup in the valley did this back in the mid-90s (Electric Communities, everal EC founders and key hires are mentioned in the Snow Crash acknowledgements) and it is amusing to see people continue to make the same mistakes and step on the same landmines every few years. EC created an entire language (E) to try to hide the complexity and remain secure, had a PERT chart where an actual color on the chart (purple I think) was used to signify that this task would be a good PhD thesis for someone, and really only managed to get a feel for just how large this elephant was before eventually pivoting in a direction that had the possibility to lead to profit in the pre-dotCom era. At best, I think they managed to stumble in the right direction for close to a decade by collecting a large group of really smart people and somehow keeping them happy and engaged for several years and through the ability of the president of the company to get Hollywood people to keep throwing money at them year after year. If you want an interesting read for the evening you should find a copy of Chip Morningstar's 'Cyberspace Protocols Requirements' paper; it holds up incredibly well for something written almost 25 years ago when most people were still on dial-up and we thought 64MB of RAM and a Pentium Pro was too much to require on the client side...