David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Another way to frame that is, for things like iMessage where I really only iMessage with like 10 or 15 people, as long as the 10 or 15 of us are on the same thing, it's okay. It's not that strong of a network effect because you don't need to interface with lots and lots of nodes in the system. Whereas with Airbnb, I don't care who owns the place that I'm staying at. I just want the most choice with the most interesting options such that there is sufficient density where I want to go in the price tier that I want when I get there. That is a truly amazing network effect where—exactly to your point—every node that's out of the system has meaningful additional value rather than this concentration where my friends around me provide value, but everyone else that’s on the network provides me none. That's actually a good point. I hadn’t thought about this, but this is probably why Instagram is—long run, even now—bigger and more valuable than Facebook. Because on Facebook, I care about my friends, my loose circles, maybe there are a thousand people on Facebook I care about. On Instagram, there are brands and there are influencers. I don't care about the rondos on there, but I do care about the millions of people making interesting content. Okay, so I think that's a big one. I do think there's another one though, this power is weakening for Airbnb over time, but in the beginning, was big… Can I guess it? Counter positioning?…

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