Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is like a total recurring theme in network driven technology companies like it doesn’t get talked a lot about these days but it’s on the internet. Like AirBnb totally did this, offered Craigslist to bootstrap their supply network to start and many, many other networks have done the same thing. Do you know about Microsoft’s like price per-core thing? We talked about this on the show, price per CPU. They basically put it when they were originally selling Windows or maybe it was DOS really early on. They had it in their sales contracts that they would make money for one copy of Windows per-core shipped by someone who entered an agreement with Microsoft to sell Windows at all. So they basically swashed the competition because manufacturers realized oh, well, I’m paying for a copy of Windows whether I put it on here or not, so I may as well ship Windows. And by the time they got sued for that, and I think actually the justice department forced them to pull that out of their contracts. By the time that came around, they had already swashed the competition and were totally way out ahead. When you’re facing a cold start problem as a network, the chicken and egg problem, like you got to have something, some unfair advantage to get through it. It doesn’t always have to be illegal but in many cases it turns out it was. So, by late 2003, the network is starting to take off a little bit, it’s still really early. The raise a Series A from Sequoia, $4.7 million which was a lot of money back in the day especially after the internet bubble had burst. Mark Kvamme joins the board later when he left Sequoia. Mike Moritz takes over and is still to this day, I believe, on the board of LinkedIn.…

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