David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, here is the ultimatum. I'm wondering if the internet and software make it so that acquisition is not the only way. Growing horizontally via acquisition is not the only way to play Standard Oil's playbook. Should we be concerned about Apple or about Amazon's anti-trustee stuff that might look like Standard Oil in a different way that is not rolling up? Those are more like platform concerns, platforms either competing with the vendors on them or perhaps abusing their position in the value chain to take too much of a rake. Whereas Bill Gurley would say a rake too far, obviously, the 30% thing with Apple. Those, I think, are different than what we're talking about here with Standard Oil. If anything, I think, Standard Oil actually was—I don't know what's better, what's worse depends on your perspective, but to my perspective played these aspects better because they could have taken a rake too far on so many things. As we talked about in the first episode, they didn't want to put all their partners out of business. They could have crushed the railroads under their foot at any time, but they didn't want to. They wanted them to profit and thrive. Maybe, actually, that's more like Apple. Where Apple's keeping the take rate where it is. They're going to take an insane amount of the profits of the work of these partners, but they want to keep the partners around. Like Apple, they're like, wow, we don't want to go build every app. So it's good to have a developer ecosystem building apps, whereas Standard Oil was like, yeah, I'm not sure we want to actually be the railroads, but it's really nice to extract as much value from them as we can.…

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