David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Most times you talk to a founder, of course, most times we talk to founders, they're pitching for investment. They're going to have a different posture. It's, oh, yeah, that is another company in our space. Yeah, here's why they're doing it wrong. Here's why that's the wrong approach. If you look at a Jensen Huang take on this, his would be like, oh, it turns out, actually, everyone else doing three-sided polygons that was right, so we're going to do everything we can to immediately move to that. You're right. Sam woke up every day and thought, how can we go find something a competitor is doing right and steal it? A core part of being a founder, I think, especially these days, is identifying something that you don't like in the world or that could be done better and then doing it better. That's how companies and products get started. But once you've done that, you've done that, you're doing it. Now go make it better. It doesn't matter what everybody else is doing wrong. I just love that one. Agree. There's one that we've talked about a bunch, so I'm just going to summarize it. Identify a wave and ride it. I never would have known that discounting was a wave that happened before starting this research. If you were operating a variety store in 1955, you may not have known that discounting was a wave that was going to come. Sam was in the right place at the right time with the right insight, and then built the company to ride the discounting wave. It's fascinating to me how, just in the course of 50 years or 70 many years, it can go from, wait, will this even be a thing to there was ever a point in time where it wasn't a thing? It was different. He both rode that wave, but also created that wave.…

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