Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I think, really, this is the question harking back to what we talked about towards the beginning of the episode. You and I have, fortunately, in our lifetimes when we were kids. But in our professional careers, we have never experienced anything like 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, where traffic on the Internet was growing 230,000% a year. We've never experienced that. We're benefiting from the aftershocks of that still. I think that's the question. Where are we in the aftershocks of that? Or is there going to be another event like that in our lifetime? I think everything in our time that we've thought of as that is mobile, cloud, Web3, VR, it's all still just the Internet. Those are aftershocks. That's not the event. Going back to this credit card game, Ponzi, or Peter to pay Paul, this mental model of borrowing against something in the future like paying your suppliers in order to do interesting things with the dollars today, I think giving that a little bit more thought since I threw it out, I think the reason why it all worked out is that the Internet ultimately provided a ton of consumer value on an ongoing basis, even when the bubble burst. If you look at traffic during 2000, 2001, 2002, people kept adopting the Internet. These tech stocks, equity investors ran away from backing them, because people got so ahead of their skis investing on clicks and not even revenue like clicks and eyeballs, let alone gross margin dollars, and hopefully, eventually free cash flow. The fact of the matter is, even though investors got scared, it provided an incredible amount of consumer value. The fact that people kept doing it meant that Amazon kept growing their customer base, the customer loyalty, and the number of transactions. There was a there there. They could survive the bubble because ultimately, more consumers kept getting more value so the party could keep going over at cashflow.com. Yes. It's interesting. I'm thinking back on my personal experience living during that time. I'm curious for you. Did you have any awareness of the tech bubble and or the tech bubble burst?…

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