Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Juno was one of the first free email services on the web. Then, they merged with NetZero and became an ISP and an email provider. It was started by Jeff and David within D. E. Shaw, both of these. That's what they're doing during these years. I think Jeff's main job is the two of them would meet every week, they would brainstorm ideas, Jeff would then go off for the rest of the weekend to research the feasibility of the ideas, work on them with employees within D. E. Shaw, and then they'd launch them. They did this with a couple of businesses. They were the only ones doing this. It's interesting how there were other people who observed the Internet. It was like, okay, cool. This is clearly the next technology wave. We had the PC. What do we do with this thing? Microsoft is one that comes to mind. This is the Rich Barton story with Expedia. That was a division of Microsoft looking at the Internet potential businesses and saying, how do we start them? Of course, I think longtime listeners will know that the way Expedia ended up happening is Rich basically said, hey, this online travel agency thing needs to happen. If we keep it in Microsoft too long, it's going to kill it. Let’s get it out brokering that deal. D. E. Shaw, I think, was actually before Microsoft in realizing, okay, the Internet is going to be huge in a handful of years, but the thing that led to the dot-com mania was people realizing all at once that oh my God, the tidal wave is coming. They were ahead of the pack, though. There were not many folks that were recognizing this at this point in time. They've done the online trading thing, the E-Trade competitor. That ended up getting acquired by Merrill Lynch. They did Juno, and they're brainstorming all these other ideas. One day, they come up with an idea that they both get pretty excited about. As Brad writes about in the book, the name for the idea is The Everything Store.…

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