Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think we should just pause the episode right now and highlight that everything comes from this. All we are doing now is capitalizing on the ripple effects or the aftershocks of this giant earthquake of which we will probably never see another one in our lifetimes. The Internet is it. It's all the Internet. This is the beginning. Everything now is still just derivative of the Internet. The idea that suddenly, everyone is networked together and can obtain any information very quickly. There wasn't even really an interaction model yet. It was just about obtaining information. There were GET requests, but there weren't POST requests. I don't know if that's technically true, but one reasonable way to think about it is you could load any web page, but there weren't a whole lot of forums you could type things into to send information back to those companies or those servers. In Jeff's head and lived experience, this is all happening at once. He's been working on this Internet stuff and there's this new idea that they're working on that he's probably more excited about than any of the other ideas. He reads these reports, the ultimate of his complacency. He's like, dang, I've got this really cushy job here at D. E. Shaw, but I might need to leave this and go do this on my own. What happens next is open for debate. Jeff wrestles with this decision for a little bit. He and MacKenzie just got married. They love their life, they love D. E. Shaw, and they love living in New York. Jeff really is the heir apparent to take over D. E. Shaw. Actually, like I'd said, just a few years later in 2001, David retires, goes back to computer science research, and leaves the firm in the hands of other people. It's very reasonable that could have been Jeff if he hadn't left.…

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