Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Cool. I had a couple, real quick. One, I was just struck in the history of facts—and we talked about it—2008 and the Recession and the Lehman Brothers collapsed. These massive events that happened in the economy and socially can have such opportunity even in Recessions. Airbnb—and again we’ve talked about this before and we’ll cover it in depth when we do an episode on this someday—what enabled Airbnb was the Recession and specifically the housing crisis, and in a much less direct way, led to the history that lead to Pinterest, and led to the history that lead to Lyft. Whenever these big events happen, it’s always a good idea to just pick your head up and say, “Hmm, okay. What retiling of the soil is this going to enable now?” But as an investor, I’m thinking about starting companies. The other thing I wanted to, that I think this story illustrates, is just the power sometimes of just not stopping, like Ben’s story, and Tote, and Cold Brew Labs, and Pinterest and doing the business plan competition, it would’ve been so easy to just give it up. Not stopping doesn’t mean banging your head against the wall with something that isn’t working. It means not giving up on the idea of building something period. Pivot what you’re doing into something that’s going to work and listen to users and find product market fit but just calling game over means literally game over. It reminds me of a great quote. Bo Lu, the CEO of FutureAdvisor, spoke at one of the first startup weekends that I organized a decade ago or something. I remember him saying, “The way to succeed is to just never admit failure.” As long as you don’t shut down, you haven’t lost. That’s not fully truly. That’s a good way that you can have a small business that doesn’t grow at all and just keep going but I think what you’re saying is if what you’re looking to do is build something big and impactful, as long as you don’t give up and build in the direction of what could catch, it’s unlikely that you will do that for your entire life, and to have something that never works. Just keep trying. I think there’s two versions of giving up or failing. One version of it is what we are doing is not working, we have failed at that, we are going to give up doing that, that’s great. When that’s clearly the case, you should do that and do that as soon as possible. But don’t do the other version of giving up which is saying, “…and thus we are going to call game over and shut down the company and go get jobs somewhere.” As long as you still have the desire and the resources to keep going, keep going.…

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