Patrick O'Shaughnessy: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think about this? Very often, I think observations like this benefit from hindsight, and it happens to be a strategy that just has worked for a lot of people in the last 5–10 years. Therefore, it feels tempting to go do the same thing. I don't know how long the runway is for this learn in public, orientation in the investing business, or just in general in businesses. I think there's always an opportunity to have a content mindset. I love Red Bull as an example, that Red Bull says the content media business that happens to sell this weird drink. I think that's really neat, and there are some businesses that the thing they actually do well is the media thing. And then the product is just a value capture mechanism versus usually, it's the other way around. We think of businesses as a product or service, and then figure out how to distribute it or market it. I do think that the internet has created this funny inversion where—with no gatekeepers to reaching the end audience—it behooves you to create media or content because that's the way they're going to notice you. You have to stand out. The way to do that is to be, as we discussed earlier, at the tail of the distribution in some way. Don't be the Walter Cronkite solution that pleases the most people, the most average amount. That's a recipe for death on the internet. Go study mischief, go study the extreme version Red Bull. Go study the extreme versions of this that are unapologetic about their uniqueness, and then do your version of that thing. I think it needs to just feel natural. If you're having a strategy session about this once a week, it's probably going to suck. You can't engineer your way to a good version of this. I think you just have to make a decision to be public about your thinking process and have a really high—I'll use Toby's phrase again—minimum quality bar for what gets shared. I type and delete a lot of stuff. I write a lot of stuff that never sees the light of day. There needs to be that curation filter for people to continue to trust you. If you can do all that, power to you. I think it's a great way to reach whoever your end audience is. I'm always hesitant when everyone's starting to agree that the one right way of doing things is X, Y, or Z because that's happened to work. Like any distribution channel, Facebook in the early days was super cheap, and it's not now. Ditto Google, ditto everywhere. This was a really "cheap acquisition strategy" for the last 5 or 10 years. Whether or not it will be in the next 5 or 10 is an open question that I don't have the answer to. Yeah. Really interesting thing. This is contrasted against Facebook and Google—once you're at scale, this channel continues to be cheap, at least relative to new entrants. I think you've definitely seen this with your podcast. We've seen it with ours where because we had a 4-year head start on the podcast mania and planted our flags in our respective niches and said, this is the thing we're weird on the internet about. Come join us. If we had to pay per listener, and we were doing that against anybody else who wanted to start a podcast for the same reason. We don't have to do that because there's just so much organic goodness that comes out there from building that brand that's compounded over the years.…

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