A million times yes. So obvious and yet I don't remember seeing this once in the last batch of stock option posts.

My personal favorite signal: there has to be some number of people that are saying 'I LOVE your product!' Similar to what Paul Buchheit says on many people liking vs some people loving your product.

I love neither Windows nor MS Office, but I paid handsomely for these. Also, I don't know people who particularly love to integrate an ARM core into their chip, and I doubt that Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc. etc. love to pay $30M for an ARM architecture license which gives them the privilege to then reimplement the core themselves, but they all pay up.

On the other hand, I love independent animation, but I don't pay that much to creators and the average independent animation lover might pay less than me. I also love vim (perverse, I know) but I wouldn't pay for it what I pay for Office (Office opens documents that nothing else does and that I must open, while text files can be edited in endless free programs.)

This goes to show that love and money don't always go hand in hand, and is an example of the more general problem with picking winner companies: they're all very different. That's why I didn't say much about it: it's very hard to give good, general advice on this. (And if I could give such advice, I'd be off investing in companies with no time left for blogging.) That said, someone contemplating to work for a specific company might research that company and come up with specific reasons to like it; a bit like how you can prove that a given program terminates even though you can't generalize your strategy for an arbitrary program.