Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Amazon is definitely a two-sided network effect or I guess now with AWS, all of the different businesses that Amazon has multi-sided, but for them, the flywheel is about adding to one side of the network effect and then that pushing the other side. Disney and the companies they’ve acquired in their flywheel, don’t know how much it’s about a network effect, but it almost makes me think more of like economies of scale in sort of old world businesses. But I guess you could argue to the extent that people come, that consumers come to see content. That the more consumers they have coming to see Disney content, the more they can channel those consumers into other Disney content and then so you could think about it as kind of a content consumer network effect. But it's not as strong, I don’t think. Yeah. It’s a good point. It’s funny in thinking about the best way to define flywheels or potentially if you’re in an existing business to see flywheel opportunities in the business. I think a good way to define it might be what does your existing asset of business line customer capabilities, all those things, allow you to do that is an unfair advantage, that people starting from a cold start wouldn’t be able to do. So that’s sort of criteria one. Then criteria two is does the existence of that new thing that you do feedback and grow your original business. Disney – somebody trying to create a caricature like a toy business doesn’t have Disney’s IP, so they’re fall on their face. So criteria one is like, “Boy, you can really bootstrap a merchandise business.” And then criteria two is of course more people are going to go want to see the movies and visit the parks if they have the toys. This makes me think about Airbnb and what they’re doing now with launching experiences and blending both of the lodging and experiences into trips. Lots of people have tried to solve the kind of destination services and travel for a long time but Airbnb has a complete unfair advantage in that they have travelers who are coming and using their site to book lodging and especially travelers who are oftentimes looking for experiences at the destinations they’re going to. And so they can feed that into the experiences product and then as that product matures and potentially someday people will be coming to Airbnb specifically for experiences, then they can funnel those people into booking lodging. You could paint what they’re trying to do now in a flywheel.…

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