Hamilton Helmer: belief

Transcript context

…Is 3M a good example of this lower right, where they know how to make all kinds of interesting stuff but for completely different customer bases, completely different use cases? My view of 3M is that they're basically a material science company. Material science is weird. It's not fully or at least it used to be, I'm not currently on it so much, but not fully developed theoretically. There are all kinds of nichey idiosyncratic aspects to it. They were able to invent stuff. If you think of post-it notes, that was a not so sticky glue, and then they didn't know what the hell to do with it. It went on for years. There is a champion in the thing that just said, no, there's something great here. They almost missed it. It came down to a final marketing trial where they almost didn't follow up on it. Wow, it is great. I've never really thought about that. I know it's a famous story, but objectively, it was a really crappy product that they made, and then they turned that crappiness into a feature.…

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