Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…We thought we would be really clever here with our first one. Both because this genuinely is one of our favorite themes and we thought this will be counter positioned. Everybody's going to talk about it's May 2022, there's doom and gloom. It's going to be good. Then, of course, a great friend of the show, Anu Hariharan, came up earlier tonight and already beat the optimism drum, but we will highlight it once again. Our first lesson from all the stories we've told is that optimism always wins. For folks here in the auditorium, raise your hand if you know who the people are who are on this slide. Wow, this is awesome. We're getting almost no hands raised. For folks at home, I don't know if we have a single hand up. Wow, this is awesome. The person on the left is Akio Morita and the person on the right is Masaru Ibuka, and they were the co-founders of the Sony Corporation. We told this story in about 3 hours earlier this year on Acquired. It is amazing, but we thought it would be the perfect story to kick off the night because it's just so perfect for this moment. As we said, there are not a lot of reasons for looking out at the landscape of the markets right now to be an optimist, but the Sony story reminds us that things were much worse than they are today in the recent past. Sony was founded in 1946 in Japan and just think about that time in 1946 in Japan. You think 2022 in America might be a bad time to start a company or a tough time to start a company. I don't know that in recent history there has been a worse time and place to try and live your life and do any sort of business, let alone start a brand new innovative technology firm. Right. These two men decided to start a company, which is crazy in and of itself in Japan in 1946. Even crazier, they decided to start a consumer electronics company. Crazy for two reasons. One, after the war, there was no technology left in Japan so what are they going to make? Their first product was a wooden rice cooker.…

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