Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…We put on serious business pants for once. The company was really on the line. It was going to be really hard fundraising or doing anything when we had negative gross margins and too much supply. The craziest thing that happened was one, everybody bought in and got really excited by this vision, even though it was a ton of work. We had to flip spaces. Part of the thesis was, we have this crazy thing that nobody else has, which is that we can rent spaces out for as little as an hour. We have this data science team that can price space for as little as an hour. So if somebody wants to rent a space for one month and then we want to put it back online for hourly bookings, in three days, we'll flip it back and forth depending on what the market is telling us, which meant that for the [...] team, it was an absolute nightmare. For the design team, having to design between the two types of spaces, absolute nightmare. But everybody bought in. We turned the thing around, and we went from -25% margins to +25% margins. Things were going really, really well. Ben and I were both like, wow, the strategy actually matters here. Having a plan, getting people to buy into it, and having something that makes sense and fits within the market, all of that actually, it's not just BS. It's a really meaningful thing. So I think that was probably also part of why I ended up writing a newsletter that was about strategy. To foreshadow, I think, at one point early on, you described Not Boring as if Bill Simmons and Ben Thompson had a baby. Clearly, this is where the Ben Thompson side comes from. A hundred percent.…

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