Patrick O'Shaughnessy: belief

Transcript context

…I think so. Yeah. That little concept of just that little plot. Every time I see a marketplace now, that's the very first thing I think of. I've had Benchmark guys and girls on recently, so I'm thinking about them, but Chetan's idea that open source as a business model is not about saving on R&D. It's about building differentiated distribution among developers. Matt Ball's idea in media is that if we reach a metaverse, it's not about Ready Player One. It's about the interoperability of the systems that let you move value through the system. There are not these like walled gardens. It's creating like a common layer, a portable layer of information and value that would ultimately represent what a metaverse is. Charlie Songhurst's idea that the best way to think about labor is to search for uncompetitive markets. That Silicon Valley is a terrible place to look for labor, but that's where everyone looks for labor. That you should probably be looking at Bulgaria or something like this because there's talent everywhere just on the internet. We've seen this have been going fully remote. Go to uncompetitive places when you're looking for stuff. I could do this all day. I love Katrina Lake's idea. She's the CEO of Stitch Fix. That legacy ecommerce was all about speed, convenience, and price, and that the future of ecommerce will be about personalization. It's the same concept we were talking about earlier where the early internet was the explosion of information. Now it's too much. We need to curate it down. Daniel Ek's idea about seeing around corners as a company scales, and having that felt experience of what you're going to need if you're growing 30% a month in 6 months is not what the human brain is designed to process. Thinking about what a scale-up looks like and getting around those corners as early as you can. There's this amazing story of a woman named Kat Cole, who is the Chief Operating Officer for Focus Brands, which oversees Cinnabon, Carvel, Jamba Juice, and several other related food brands. She told me this story about how she was a Hooters waitress at her first job. And these guys kept giving her a hard time about chicken wings because they would order 50 and then insist when they ate all the bones that they'd only been given 45. They would give her a hard time every Friday. Finally, one Friday, as they were nearing the end, she just showed up with 10 extra wings and gave them hell about it. All the guy's buddies chastised them, and from then on, they tipped well and they thanked her. She completely inverted this whole thing on them, and I've seen that a lot of ways this inversion to deal with challenging people, by going right back at them is incredibly powerful. I could probably do a whole another segment on everything Sarah Tavel has taught me. Everything she puts out is like a tool kit to be messed with and thought about. ack at them is incredibly powerful. I could probably do a whole another segment on everything Sarah Tavel has taught me. Everything she puts out is like a tool kit to be messed with and thought about. Maybe the last one I'll close with is one of my all-time favorites, which is another venture investor named Josh Wolfe who runs Lux Capital and his idea of the directional arrow of progress. Which is one of the most obvious ideas after the fact that you can encounter, which is basically just like a lot of these technology trends are plotting. You can see what's going to happen based on what's happened in the past. In my world, the cost of a commission for a trade-in, a brokerage account is a great example of this. You can just see technology making that cost go down every couple of years, and Robinhood's genius was they said, let's extrapolate this directional arrow to its endpoint and go to zero. Let's jump the line. I think jumping the line on these directional arrows or progress is a really interesting way to generate business ideas. In many ways, that's what we're trying to do with Canvas. We've learned so much from covering China tech on Acquired. That's one thing that really strikes me. The difference between the Chinese startup tech and venture ecosystem is that's the primary thing that I think people think about over there. What's the trend? What's the plot? Where is it going to end up? That's not as common here in the West, but should be.…

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