Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, one thing I want to put in there which is a little bit of tech them, a little bit just like a rumination as I was thinking about this. We talked in our last Acquired episode, we had Brad Stone on and we had talked about Uber and Didi and probably by the time we post this on the Acquired show, we will have done the Snapchat IPO is this week and we’re going to do a sort of real-time reaction to that, so I suspect this episode will come out after that. But I think these three episodes together sort of form sort of a series here on Acquired about kind of the nature of competition and the importance of sort of sustainable, defensible, competitive advantages. I’m thinking about in Uber and Didi how, we talked about with Brad how the sort of idea of like scorching the earth versus building a moat that the ridesharing companies have all taken and then certainly with Snap, we haven’t recorded that episode yet but there’s lots of discussion and consternation in the market about what is Snap’s moat, does it have one or is it, as Ben Thompson says, pursuing the Gingerbread Man strategy of just constant indefensible product innovation. But this, you know, Google I think is really an example and maybe one of the best we’ve had on this show of an incredibly sustainable, defensible competitive advantage. And we see it at work here between Overture had the head start, had figured out the business model but then Google came in and just ate their lunch and sustained that. Why was that? I’m tempted to say it was the technology and that’s why I got all excited about GFS and MapReduce and Hadoop that comes out of it. But I think it’s even more than that. I think it’s using that technology to create this platform that is matching supply and demand and both users on one side and producers and advertisers on the other side, producers of content and advertisers just in a fundamentally better way than other people are capable of. But I don’t know, curious what you guys think. David, it's like, I think we touched a little bit earlier on it but the reason that they have long-term defensibility I think is related to that whatever the second person was willing to pay auction and extrapolated out real far, it looks like everybody is getting a good deal. It’s a continued feeling that me as a customer or as a searcher, when I go to search on Google, yeah there’s a bunch of ads but it’s either they’re relevant, they’re most of the time relevant or other times I can very quickly get to the organic search, like I feel like there’s a free service out there that’s really good where I’m getting a good deal. And many times as an advertiser – and Brian, you can really probably shed some more light on this – I’d give money to Google and I get more value out of it. Like I feel like I'm getting a good deal. And over and over again, I think that these enduring companies are made when everybody in the ecosystem looks at it like hey, this is not a zero-sum game thing here, like everybody’s doing well by this thing existing. I think that's a great point. If you think about, just to jump in real quick and I’m curious, Brian, your thought on as an advertiser in Google, but Amazon works the same way, right? Like as a consumer, you’re like, “Yeah, I’m getting a great deal here.” I’m getting better price, more selection, more convenience. And as a seller on the marketplace, I think you also feel like you’re probably getting a pretty good deal in terms of the volume you’re going to be able to sell versus anywhere else. Versus you’d look at something like Uber, and Uber certainly still has potential to be an incredible company and a dominant platform. However, I think there’s a hole on the driver side right now. I don’t feel like drivers on Uber feel like they’re getting a great deal.…

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