David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…Then all of a sudden there’s all this data that is not actually in LinkedIn, that’s so much more actionable and it’s like oh, just the mere breadcrumb trail that they’ve left from doing their work creates a much richer profile. Or you can imagine sort of the same thing on AngelList like it moves out from founders and VCs to employees and then people are actually incentivized to keep their AngelList profile up to date. That proliferates to other industries. Design. There was a company called Behance that Adobe bought that was doing this. Totally agree. If you were going to attack LinkedIn, this is the only way to do it because it’s the only way where you can actually get enough critical mass. Like a network is of zero value until it is of critical mass value and then it is of, like, completely defensible value. But I really think it would be a fool’s errand to try and build a horizontal wide-based professional network at this point. Yeah. I mean in the same way that it would be foolish to build a horizontal video hosting platform at this point or a horizontal pure social network. I think the era of horizontal platform – Horizontal platforms, once they have network effects applied, you don’t disrupt them by building out a horizontal platform. I think that that’s just an interesting thing to note when you’re thinking about starting new start-ups because I’ve heard so many people say “LinkedIn sucks, I’m going to try unseat it and disrupt LinkedIn.” Like yeah, we all have our product qualms but you’re not going to do it by creating a better horizontal LinkedIn.…

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