It's interesting when you see tech people trying to reason about concepts that have been thoroughly discussed and rediscussed, without said tech people seemingly having any background in that. At least its better than MBA and business types doing it ...
Ultimately it seems to me the authors unit of value is dollars. more dollars = success.
while i agree mostly there is also the value that you provide to actual people, which IMO should not be measured in $ but something harder to quantify.
This is the main reason I enjoy working at startups, that the actual (not monetary) value is not the main motivation (for some it is but i feel there would be simpler and more reliable ways to make money)
When you draw the line, for both investors and owners, the unit of value is indeed dollars. The goal is to maximise the amount of money you make (subject to some constraints of course), and the use value that people derive is secondary. I think the two are even to an extend opposed in our world - you want to maximise the exchange value (i.e. the money you make) for the least amount of use value (i.e. how useful it is to the person) you can, because ultimately you do not want to permanently fulfil that persons need - you need them to come back and pay again.
Startups are constrained by the same thing, the whole "doing it to save the world" is just a bullshit story, and monetisation will always rear its ugly head eventually, or the startup will die, because what is doing is genuinely good, but cannot be monetised or ads cannot be inserted in it ...
