Brad Gerstner: belief

Transcript context

…It's totally separate. It's this B2B, we're going to need the rising tide to power all these businesses. Are there other core pillars of areas where you look for where you're like, oh, this is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity where we want to have several bets in the portfolio on that. One of the things you correctly identify, which is, I think that unless you have an architecture, unless you deconstruct what's going on in the world and try to understand the theme, the human behavior that's driving these events, then you just have a bunch of data points that are disconnected. As an investor, our job is to look at these complex fact patterns and try to make sense out of them. One of the things that was very clear to me in the early 2000s is that the internet is the most fabulous thing in the history of the world that connects all these people. It unleashes all this productivity, but it's chaotic. How the hell can you find anything? If you think about that decade, that decade was the decade of search, horizontal and vertical search. Booking.com was a vertical search company. KAYAK, a vertical search company. Zillow, a vertical search company. Google, horizontal search business. Baidu, horizontal search business. And then there were these ecommerce businesses that were the beneficiaries. They learned how to tuck into the underbelly of the discovery engines. That was an investable theme for a decade. Google's desktop search, I think, didn't go negative until 2012, maybe the fall of 2012. That's when there were fewer people searching on desktop on a year over year basis because people were switching to their mobile devices. Which has a totally different entry point.…

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