Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. He may actually be a gangster. He was never satisfied. No matter how big Standard Oil got, it was never big enough. No matter what competitor he would acquire into the fold by whatever means necessary or no matter what railroad, he just did a deal. He would always use that to say, okay, tomorrow morning, I wake up and we figure out how to use my new more valuable company. All right, number six. This is another one that is near and dear to my heart. It's never too late. There are actually two meanings to this lesson. One is also another great Marc Andreessen piece of wisdom. There's a great famous quote of his from an interview. I think this was in 2014 that he did, where he said, "I came out here in 1994 to Silicon Valley, and the valley was in hibernation. My big feeling was I just missed it. I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the 80s, and I got here too late, and Silicon Valley was over." Obviously, that was completely not true. What's cool about this is that Silicon Valley and technology moves in waves. It's related to Moore's Law. Every time there's a 10X in computing, there's a new market, there's a new paradigm, there's a new technology that gets created. Yes, Marc was right. He missed the PC wave. It was too late for that, but he was right on time for the Internet wave. As long as Moore's Law holds, if you work in technology, if you invest in technology, if you build technology-enabled products, it's never too late. You're always right on the cusp of the next generation that's coming. The other meaning of it's never too late, folks who are viewing the video here in the auditorium will notice we have not Marc Andreessen on this slide, but Dr. Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC. This is I think the other lesson that I've really taken from Acquired is in this vein, which is that Morris Chang was 56 years old when he founded TSMC. TSMC is today, I believe, the 11th most valuable company in the world. It's so easy. The flip side of the coin of there's always another generation, there's always another wave. We should say that it maybe the thing keeping geopolitical tensions at rest. It may be the force that nobody wants to destabilize, and therefore, we have peace. It's not just a company. But it's easy to think, if you listen to Marc or that there's always another wave, that's for young people. Like it's Steve Jobs, it's Mark Zuckerberg, it's Vitalik Buterin. It's these young kids who get these new waves of technology. The reality is that's just not true. It's just a mindset. You have to be willing to dive in and do it. You can do it at 56 years old and still build the 11th most valuable company in the world.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.