Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Design. There was a company called Behance that Adobe bought that was doing this. Totally agree. If you were going to attack LinkedIn, this is the only way to do it because it’s the only way where you can actually get enough critical mass. Like a network is of zero value until it is of critical mass value and then it is of, like, completely defensible value. But I really think it would be a fool’s errand to try and build a horizontal wide-based professional network at this point. Yeah. I mean in the same way that it would be foolish to build a horizontal video hosting platform at this point or a horizontal pure social network. I think the era of horizontal platform – Horizontal platforms, once they have network effects applied, you don’t disrupt them by building out a horizontal platform. I think that that’s just an interesting thing to note when you’re thinking about starting new start-ups because I’ve heard so many people say “LinkedIn sucks, I’m going to try unseat it and disrupt LinkedIn. ” Like yeah, we all have our product qualms but you’re not going to do it by creating a better horizontal LinkedIn. I think this plays for me, well, one point I want to bring out about the acquisition that plays really strongly in here is LinkedIn, they’re smart guys and gals. They get this. So what has LinkedIn been more terrified of than anything else in its history, its people exfiltrating the network off of LinkedIn and stealing it out and bootstrapping it and competing with them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.