David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…Right. It’s kind of guilt-inducing for me because Rapportive was the first to get to billions of users and I’m like, “I am sorry, guys. I did not intend it to be this way.” It actually makes me sad. One of the rules I think we’ve talked about at various points on the show before, all rules and startups inventors were meant to be broken, but you can’t build a big company on the back of somebody else’s platform. There are very, very few examples and as long as Gmail and Microsoft are the platforms and you’re just building plugins—Rapportive being the most successful among them—you’re just going to be a plugin. I think that’s true, although I would like to see, for example, Grammarly be the exception to that rule. I think at this point, they’re probably the highest-valued, most successful plugin business. Fingers-crossed, they actually break the barrier and break out since their own thing. But you’re right. That there’s a lot of existential crisis around there.…

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