David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…But did you need every business practice? Would it have been possible for him to create something so valuable and to align so many interests without having allegedly had stakes in three teams? Capitalism is great because when you have an incentive to succeed, you succeed. And if everybody is pushed to succeed, you create value in the world. There’s this question of if he was hired into a regulatory bureaucratic organization, could you have created something so valuable without dealing some cards to yourself? I don’t think so. The only example I can think of from our Acquired cannon here is Visa and Dee Hock, of a founder of something of this magnitude that did it without really realizing any equity for himself. I guess Morris Chang and TSMC too, although Morris over time did get quite a significant stake in TSMC through equity grants, and Dee (I think) got paid quite a bit at Visa too. It’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but I think it’s pretty rare. That BCCI structure was really a blocker for the incentives here. It’s like you almost needed a Lalit to come along and do this on behalf of the BCCI while wetting my beak (so to speak) on the side too. They’re a partner with me in creating this. You really do need these crazy Dee Hock–type above reproach people, to walk into a low trust environment, a low trust ecosystem, and need to do these deals to create something from nothing without crossing any lines, and it’s a rare bird. All right, let’s land the plane. I have two points to my quintessence. One is Ed Cowan put it best. If you were to design a sports league to maximize the bottom line, this is how you would do it. My second one is, this is the product. I mean that in a mathematical sense. Multiply that these things together, the Indian middle class emergence, TV penetration, and smartphone explosion. The TV penetration went from 40% to 74% during the IPL’s run. Internet usage went from under 5% to over 60% today. The population, the literal number of people increased by 230 million. That is the adult population of the US stacked onto the existing population since the IPL was created, is just this perfect storm of tailwinds for this to exist.…

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