Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, I love how Acquired finally made the New York Times for narrative violations. Amazing. Thanks, Erin. A narrative violation for sure happening right now is that you can't create a new consumer social network like, “Sorry, we live in the post-Facebook world and that's not happening,” and yet, TikTok did. So, what happened? The way that I was thinking about this is initially, to emerge as a social network and sort of “the one,” it was simple. You could just enable people to communicate with each other with messages or whatever, wallpost, and show information about themselves. Things like basic Friendster or early Facebook. This was very primitive creative expression. It was basically just a communication channel. But the way to disrupt that world is to create a new canvass for people to easily be creative within. This comes a little bit from Eugene Wei’s theory from this amazing post, Status as a Service, but you basically need a canvass that enables people to be creative without doing a lot of work and to have a large amount of variance in what can be created, because this will facilitate a new generation of creating, sharing, following, and thus TikTok was able to be explosive in growth by nailing the format of this new method for creative expression. You can consider that basically like an amplifier for the work that one has to put in on what they can get out the other side. By enabling this new format, this new canvass that you have the ability to paint on and be more creative than you thought you can be, it naturally attracts people to it. Then you can bootstrap a new network on top of that. TikTok is about sharing with anyone where Facebook and Instagram where about sharing with friends. David, this is where I want to bring in your point. There's a much higher K-factor or the viral coefficient when the content can get distributed to that much larger group. This really gets to your point of winner take all. It's really like diving into Metcalfe's Law, which is that aphorism that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users in a system or equals N squared. The flaw in applying this to the Facebooks of the world is that with something like Facebook, it's not actually N squared because when a new person I don't know joins Facebook, it's extremely unlikely that it actually increases the value for me. But with TikTok, that's not true. It actually is N squared.…

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