Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I’m going to agree with you with a caveat on this one and more to come on my front in 2017 on this idea. But my view at least right now on this question is I think the key to the data is its data and how your customers and your domain and people who could be your customers. And the interaction between those customers and what your product is. So yes, I agree that if you have multiple companies doing the same thing, the company that has the most data and the most robust and rich data is going to be able to create this most superior customer experience via Aggregation Theory which we have talked about ad nauseum. But to the extent you’re doing something slightly different, I don’t think it pivots very well. That gives me some hope for opportunities for startups. I think there’s this category of things. So, I see you, I think there’s definitely a category of things around personalization where all those points are like spot on. Anything that requires lots of information about you to bootstrap from, for example like showing you the photos of your best memories of the last five years when you were in motion. Queries like that. But Google has the most photos of cats. So anything that relies on a very accurate cat recognizer, you’re not going to beat Google at that. I think about these companies have the largest datasets of like a lot of things. I think you’re right that outside of the domain of things that these companies capture, like you can imagine flow meters on plumbing, none of these big tech companies have the data on flow meters on plumbing. But anything that’s like photo related or conversation related, or data sets that people create in interactions with themselves and the world, it is really locked up there. I think there’s probably interesting opportunities to try and go find data sets elsewhere and figure out what value can be created from those that those companies don’t have. I think that’s right. I guess the perspective I’m coming at it from is if you think about all the activities in our economy and in our lives, there is an infinite spectrum of products and services that can be built that are very different. I guess excitement I come at it from is that you think about Google and the things you were saying, understanding cats. And I do think machine vision is going to be perhaps the biggest category of machine learning, value creation in the coming years. A company that I work with, that were investors in Madrona is a company called Booster Fuels and they deliver gas to your car. You wouldn’t think that that would be driven by machine learning but actually turns out that the route that trucks take to deliver gas is hugely important and the more efficient you get at that, the better your vision that your product will be and the better your business will be. Google can’t do that.…

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