David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I don’t think they had any plans to do that, but it’s the same rationale of Mark Zuckerberg saying uh-oh, everyone’s using WhatsApp for messaging. Whether or not they put in a social media feed stream, they always could. So it’s really dangerous to me for them to be out there aggregating all the users and attention and habits when they always could do something like that. Exactly. Same dynamic. Whereas in the previous categories of apps that we talked about, Google had the advantage of uniquely being able to do it as Google in a way that startups couldn’t. Here, it’s a little bit the opposite. YouTube as a small startup has the advantage of, oh, copyright, rules, laws. I don’t know. We’re just a platform. We’re just a startup. Anybody upload anything. Google, by this point in time is a public company. No way they could behave like this. Well, it’s funny. They could but they wouldn’t. They actually could do it and stay in business. Whereas YouTube can say, eh, whatever, but then they’re going to go out of business because they’re going to get sued out of business. It’s this really interesting catch-22 of this is the way to start and get all the users because this is the best user experience. At the same time, it will not work as a resource-constrained small company.…

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