Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Wow! I know. To me, because I look at it this way, like Instagram wasn’t really company saving for Facebook. Instagram has become an incredible boon but would Facebook be completely irrelevant if it weren’t for Instagram? I mean Instagram helped them inform the mobile strategy and like lots more young people interact more per day on Instagram, but in the way that I think that Apple would have been totally hosed without buying NeXT, I think that Priceline may have been totally hosed without buying Booking, and Booking has turned into a gigantic business. Like just comparing Priceline and Expedia, Priceline’s market cap is 92 billion, Expedia’s is about 22.6. Over 2/3 of that 92 billion comes from Booking.com, going from $130 million to responsible for a market cap of 60 billion plus, A+. Wow. You heard it here first. Booking.com - bigger than Instagram. I love it. Wow! I hadn’t thought about that. We’ll let Drew have the last word here but do I think that this is better than Instagram? Yeah, I mean, you made a pretty compelling case there and I haven’t checked the latest Instagram financials. I guess so here’s my knee jerk reaction to that, but I think is the wrong one, is I would say, well, yeah, that's true but like think about market size. Instagram is everybody in the world but then I'm like, wait a minute, travel is everybody in the world too. Or at least a huge portion of it and it is monetizable at a vastly higher rate than social networking apps. So yeah, wow. I don’t know that I'm willing to go better than Instagram but I’ll go at least as good as Instagram. I’m trying to think back through all of our episodes, we have so many at this point, and the ones that are popping to mind I think at stacked rank, NeXT, I mean as we said on that show, it literally was a trillion dollars in revenue that was created by that acquisition. And then I think Instagram and Booking are both of a scale that are pretty incredible. Not a trillion dollars yet but maybe someday.…

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