David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…They managed to make themselves the point of integration for the whole industry. Oftentimes, I find myself when we're looking at these companies that are among the most successful in the world or like Microsoft, the most successful in the world, it's basically a multidimensional multiplication problem. They had this unbelievable one in a zillion thing going for them, which you can multiply by this other one in a zillion multi thing. It's the zero marginal cost, zero distribution cost, unbelievable secular growth of the PC, Moore's law happening. They're the single choke point for the whole industry. It's just crazy how many things you multiply together, and of course it should end up in a number over three trillion. Yup. I'll jump in with a playbook theme that we referenced a little bit in the episode, but we really got a highlight here. Bill, Steve, Paul, and everybody at Microsoft, were incredibly talented, incredibly smart. They saw the future in a way nobody else did, but they also were willing to hedge their bets. It's not like they just got everything right. They were going to get things wrong with OS/2, but they hedged the bets with Windows. I think that is such a key lesson of when you're in a really dynamic market like this, in our ecosystem right now in tech, venture capital, startups, whatnot, people put so much value on conviction. I have conviction. This is what the future is going to be like. I think the Microsoft story is the opposite of that. They had conviction that software was going to be big. And personal computers. Creating software for desktop computers was a really good idea, and they wanted to be the best at it.…

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