Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…in the town next door, you were entrenched, it only cost 15¢, so nobody would stop buying it in tough times. If you wanted to advertise, you wanted to advertise in the paper with the most circulation. The local movies had to be in the local paper, the local one ads, the local car ads. The great thing was that if the consumer bought it today, guess what, they had to buy it again tomorrow, because it had a one day shelf life. What could be a better business? Twenty years later, most of the companies that are in the industry are fighting for their lives. If I could just make an observation, you sound like a crazy person when you assert that en masse very quickly consumer behavior is going to change. If you would have told me when I was reading the paper, and this was the most important thing in America, newspaper values are mostly going to go to zero because all of the consumer attention is going to be shifting to consuming everything on their computers as an interconnected web of servers that doesn't really exist yet. Therefore, the newspapers won't have value. You'd be like, what? If you came to me 10 years ago and so Facebook bought Instagram, and they're demonstrating their ability to constantly keep all the consumer attention. But eventually, actually, this Chinese company is going to start and it's going to be short form, but Facebook won't figure it out this time. All the consumer attention is going to shift, and I'd just be like, you're wrong. I just don't believe you. Yeah. That's, of course, true. But I think the other thing that's really interesting to note, there are these very widely circulated charts of the speeding up of technological adoption. It was very possible for companies to be much more durable back then than it is today, in my opinion. If you transport yourself back to 1950 and you think about, well, how many businesses are there, where I think I can say, with high conviction that they'll be the same in 10 years as they are today? I think that number would probably be much, much higher than you could say, today. Without understanding what management is doing to further entrench their moats, fend off competition, or continuously evolve or whatever, it's very, very hard to say, well, with no minding of the ship, this business will just stay consistent.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.