Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. You're going back to Christensen's original book, which I think is the more interesting one, where there's a product that doesn't satisfy everybody. You could argue that Tesla's first cars were like that. The other direction is that if something is a disruptive technology, it may not be counter positioned. That's straightforward. The fact that they don't map to each other, and the fact that power maps directly to value, or there's a one-to-one mapping between power and value, that means that disruptive technology does not map to value. The simple thing about that is you can disrupt something and it can be a really lousy business. It happens all the time. You poison the well, but there's no good endpoint for it. We may be overly quoting Gurley here, but I think I saw a recent tweet, something along the lines of there is an infinite amount of product/market fit for selling dollars for 90¢. Hamilton. Yeah. Just pricing something so that people are attracted to it. Losing money, there's no power there. Next one I want to talk about is in many ways classic. I think many of our listeners already have thought a lot about this and know, but we want to ask your perspective on some nuances of it. Network effects. Hugely discussed in Silicon Valley everywhere. Everybody knows what network effects are. But one of the things you talked about in the book that I think is so accurate, and I've observed as an investor, you can talk about network effects till the cows come home. It's the intensity of the network effect that really matters. It is so hard to know that ex-ante in a market. What is the actual degree to which I care as a participant in the network about other participants in the network? How much do I care about which other participants?…

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