Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Two things here: (1) This is so sad. That's the way it was. Thank God, the business world has evolved since then. You can decry the ridiculousness of startups, VC, tech, and all that now, but this is a way better alternative than the way things used to be. (2) Ironically, I actually, as crazy as this sounds, think it was a critical element of Nike succeeding and becoming Nike. Because if it were too easy, there would have been a flood of other competitors, or Onitsuka and others would have just done this themselves. Right. It's like many of the stories we tell, it's path dependent. The only way to have built what they built was to have endured what they endured in a system that was stacked against them. Yes. There's huge survivorship bias here, but the journey that they had to go through to survive is incredible.…

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