Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I didn't know. I thought about the name. Obviously, I was inspired by Clay Christensen, Disruption Theory. That was one of the things. But I had written a number of articles going up to that were clearly building to that point. There's one about Airbnb, there's one about Netflix, there's one about just websites and publications. Aggregation Theory was short and sweet because it was basically distilling what was in those previous articles into one thing. I felt very confident I had a thing. I wanted to have a definitive piece that was doing what it was and needed to have a name. That's what that was. Ben, I have one more section that I want to do, which is you do all this analysis on companies. You have this very enviable position of getting to comment on and critique their strategies after they announce them or an event after they do them. I want to play a game where I give you a company. I'm curious, either if you were the CEO or you were giving advice to the CEO, what would you do strategically? I think an interesting place to start as we talked about it a bunch on this episode is Meta. You are the new CEO of Meta. What do you do over the next five years? I think Meta is actually doing a fair number of things that they should now. The Apple changes were very devastating. They're structurally devastating, so they deserved a significant haircut on their valuation because of that, But I also think they were moat enhancing in the long run, where I question whether any other company is ever going to build a top of the funnel advertising product that will be competitive with Meta, assuming they can keep their audience. It appears that they've done a good job limiting the TikTok threat. TikTok's growth has flattened out over the last few years. I think they're actually in good shape. What I do worry about is this is a company that's always been growing. It's really hard for those companies to shift to more of a scarcity mindset. They laid off 11,000 people, which only brings them back like 9 months. They probably needed a lot smaller, but it's also very disruptive to company culture and morale. Do they still have the people that they need to pull that off? Those are probably some of the bigger questions. Obviously, any aggregator is dependent on having that audience, but I do think that the network effects of their products are still underrated. Everyone has in their head that they're shrinking. Actually, every product they have is still growing, which I think is under-appreciated. (1) I think they're probably on the right track. (2) I would acquire Shopify, and I would have the FTC just throw it to court when they sue to stop it. I think they need to close the loop on ecommerce and advertising. Again, I think that'd probably be bad, generally, but I think it'd be very good for Meta, so I would do that. As far as the metaverse stuff, I think it's a bad idea. It's very hard to talk about metaverse, because it's like, what are the prospects versus is it XYZ? I do think that it's not just a bad idea because it's taking so many resources and attention from Mark Zuckerberg. But also, I just don't think innovation is necessarily born of mass expenditures in large companies. We skipped over a period of experimentation and ecosystem-building that in the long run, perhaps, would be consolidated into a couple of companies, but instead of just one monolith trying to brute force this bit. The reality is Facebook is a services company. It's a social network, and everything about their strategy works against that. To succeed, they not only need to sell headsets, they need to sell headsets at sufficient scale and into friend networks such that people can social network on the headsets. Their place of winning is even further away than I think people think. I don't think strategically, it's the best thing for them to be doing. I've been pretty anti them from day one. They bought Oculus, I said it was bad. Again, it's very hard to distinguish between, well, what are the prospects of this versus zooming out? Or should they even be doing this?…

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