Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. That's actually a great analogy. I certainly think he's capable. I think the business is capable. It probably will never be an Apple, but I think it's capable of performing better than it is now. Okay, more bear narratives. We talked about the slowing growth, we talked about the fact that they revised down not only the revenue targets but also the subscriber targets. They're only predicting they're going to be at around $3 million at the end of the year rather than three and a half. They have piled up $1.3 billion worth of bikes and treadmills. It's not good to hold it in the books. Another interesting narrative that I haven't seen as much around Peloton specifically but seems to be a fairly widely held belief is that in the last 10+ years, there has not been a breakout consumer hardware piece of technology that survives as a standalone company. You look back at Fitbit, GoPro, and Jambox. I even want to call out this one's going to be a serious callback, but Flip Video. Some of these companies that invented a new category and imbued it with meaning and they pioneered it on hardware that was just now available. But that investment doesn't pay itself back. Lots of cheap facsimiles come in and they can't defend the castle. You look at Jambox, they made a $300 Bluetooth speaker, and now you can get $20 Bluetooth speakers that are reasonable. Jambox, of course, went out of business. Flip Video sold to Cisco in a very strange M&A. GoPro is still an independent company, but certainly not the highflier it was when it first IPO'd. Fitbit couldn't really survive Apple coming into their market and ultimately landed at Google. I think there's probably a case, a similar story around Nest, again, a little bit weird and some bungled M&A. I suppose Sonos might be the only example of a recent consumer hardware company that has been "successful" as a standalone public business. I thought about bringing this up earlier in the episode and I decided not to because I decided it was unfair to Peloton. I still think it's unfair, but it's an interesting point of comparison. The only very strong counterpoint I can think of is Tesla.…

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