Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That was a challenge because I started out, I had no access. I didn't know anyone. In some respects, I missed those days. I still remember the first time I had a company very angry at me and called me in. It was Twitter, actually, because I had teased out their results. Their direct response program was failing. This was years ago. They got super mad. In my next update, I'm like, this is possible. I kind of walked back a little bit. The next quarter came out and they're like, I don't need to write it down, but it was a big thing. They said, it's not working out. I was totally right, and I was so mad that I walked back a little bit. But I'm glad it happened because when I started out, no one cared. No one paid any attention. Now, people cared and paid attention. I'm glad I was right on that one because it gave me courage going forward. What is interesting about feedback from companies is everyone from COO down or VP down, they always push back. They're like, no, you got this wrong, you don't understand XYZ. I never get pushback from CEOs, even when I'm wrong. What I've come to realize is, CEOs are surrounded by people telling them what they want to hear. That's their incentive. The reason why the VP is attacking me is because he's worried I'm going to make the VP look bad in front of the CEO. That's the concern. Whereas the CEO is like, they're so thirsty for any feedback that's outside of that rotten incentive structure that's just inherent in a corporation. Sometimes they know they have more information than I do. They're aware that there are things that I don't know, but they're grateful to have a different point of view. Over time, I transfer from having no access to having total access. I can reach out to basically anyone. Just for people who haven't, let's just go through the lineup. You've had this year Mark Zuckerberg, you've had Jensen from Nvidia. I'm trying to think of some of your early big ones. You have Rich Barton on from Zillow. I think he credited you with, you convince us to start buying houses. You convinced us in the open door article that— I don't know if I should apologize to him or what. I was trying to figure out, what do I do with this access? I didn't want to become a reporter. I thought it was just important to me personally from my own pride that my takes are my takes. I'm not getting fed them from someone else. What I ended up going with was interviews. Part of this was a product bit. Now you can listen to Stratechery via podcast. If I had an interview, there's a good reason to try the product out, to get it so there's a product angle. But also, my whole take is I'm not exclusive. I don't have exclusive information. What I'm selling is my personal analysis. If I'm talking to a CEO, I don't want the sense to be Ben just parroting what the CEO says. If a CEO wants to talk to me, it has to be on the record, and the full transcript and the full interview is going to be available to my subscribers. I want my subscribers to have all the same information I do. When I write, it's me. It's coming out of my brain, it's unique to me. I think it's worked out pretty well. It's a change. Instead of me writing four days a week, I'm basically three days a week plus an interview. It's not just CEOs. I think, actually, often the better interviews are with other analysts or people in different spaces. This also solved the how do I cover startups, because part of not being a reporter and being independent is that public companies have to disclose a lot of data. They have earnings calls, they have presentations, and things along those lines. With a startup, you don't have access to very much of that, and you don't know how much is blowing smoke, how much is not. Now, I am interviewing founders, where I say upfront, look. This is completely subjective. I'm not going to verify what they say, I'm not going to XYZ. It's their chance to tell their story, what their business is going to be, XYZ. That's a way to cover that space, given the limitations in the way Stratechery operates. That's one of the products. It's not a standalone thing, which I think is better. It's still part of the Stratechery. I thought it should be a standalone product, but I think there's an aspect of I don't want there to ever be any sense that that's a driver of my bottom line. I want to be able to say that I think the Metaverse is probably a bad idea. That's really tricky. The Mark Zuckerberg one, obviously, it's a huge get. I think that his interviews with me are I'm biased, but I think are light years better than he does anywhere else.…

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