Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Well, it's interesting. They do get there. They get there in 2016, they realized that pretty quickly. But the narrative shifts so hard on the space here. I don't know if this is true but looking back on this now at the historical perspective, I wonder if what Uber did here was part of how everything shifted so hard perception-wise against Doordash. You've got Uber, this titan of startups along with Airbnb. Everybody says one of the two—at this time—canonical next-generation Internet companies is being built in Silicon Valley. Uber is basically voting with their feet that you can't make this operate profitably—the full logistics network that Doordash is doing. They're having the resort to doing this driving food around in cars to make it simpler. Interesting. Meanwhile, DoorDash has raised all this money. They're growing quickly. Consumers (at least) love the surface. They're entering all these markets. There is the $40 million Series B. Their plan is to spend the money. They are going to do it and keep raising. To do that—of course as you are launching these markets—does take a huge amount of capital. As you're saying, Ben, you got to go acquire the consumers, you got to acquire the restaurants, you got to acquire the Dashers. Then—this is another moment in Acquired history—in November of 2015, another blow against the perception of businesses like DoorDash, Square goes public. We covered this on the show. This was one of my favorite all-time Acquired episodes, our Square IPO episode. We don't do this often but we nailed that. I just feel so good about that episode, even today. It's a little bit of our older style. It's not as enjoyable to listen to. I don't think there's more recent ones, but in terms of analysis, certainly, the market had decided when they IPOed that it was not a good stock. For years afterwards, I think people had a lot of hate toward this company. They just grew 30% year over year and still are. The narrative has shifted now where people love Square, especially with cash. And Bitcoin. We were texting yesterday about this DoorDash episode and the Airbnb episode we're going to do tomorrow. Ben, you had such a good point about us at Acquired. When we do this live, on-the-scene episodes, it's actually when we are at our second best. We're still good, they're better than the average Acquired episode—not that the average one is bad, hopefully—but our best Acquired episodes are when we have a view on a company that other people don't and don't realize yet. That was the case with Square. What are we talking about, for people who don't remember the history? Square had been also a Silicon Valley darling. Raised money from Sequoia, plenty other great firms, multi-billion dollar valuations. They were in this first group of unicorns talked about alongside Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and the like. Then they made a crazy decision (relative to their peers) to go public. They go public in fall of 2015 and the market completely turns against them. This was the down round IPO. They’re priced at $9 a share for a less than $3 billion market cap. Oh my goodness. Today, they are trading at $213 a share and a hair under $100 billion market cap. But Meme Style popping up all over the Valley and TechCrunch, dead unicorn, this is going to be the reckoning, and the bubble has popped.…

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