Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…And all this whole generation, multiple generations now of startup founders that have really embraced and romanticized this whole startup thing. On the one hand, it’s great. Silicon Valley’s so much bigger. There’s so much more investment, there are so many more VCs and all that. But it’s also just all ironic that it’s glorifying this startup phase when that is not the point. Deeply. Okay. then we’ve touched on this one a bunch, but I want to put a pin in it. Why has Facebook always been in a precarious position? Why do they need to keep fighting these existential battles? Why are they so obsessed with building a platform? I think the answer is they want to be as durable as a company that makes hardware with an operating system, that all the users use and all the developers have to target because all the users are there. I think that’s what they really want, but because they’ve never had quite that much defensibility, like, oh, a network effect is good, but it’s not as good as that incredible platform durability. They’re always trying to expand and be more every time they bump up against someone else, it creates a problem for them. I’m using a bunch of weird metaphors here, but it just seems like the place that they occupy in the technology stack is just not quite privileged enough to do the things that they want to do, so they’re always at the whim of someone else knocking them around. I think that’s right, and it will be very interesting to revisit this again in 5 or 10 years.…

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