Patrick O'Shaughnessy: prediction

Transcript context

…Get as many customers as possible. Thank God we didn't. Any system is fragile in the early days, and it needs to have that slow organic growth. One of my all-time favorite books is The Systems Bible, by John Gall. One of my favorite lessons from that book is you can't just AirDrop a complex system and have it work. It's got to have evolved from a simple system. There's incredible wisdom in Chetan's advice to go very slow in the early days with enterprise software specifically and reach product maturity. That's one example. I'll never forget when I messaged Bill Gurley, Chetan’s partner. Someone had raised this idea of creating a marketplace for obituary writers. The idea was, can you have obituary writers on one side and living people on the other side that commission the writers to write a really high-quality, retrospective obituary type thing in their life? Because newspapers no longer really did this as much as part of cost-cutting. I thought, wow, and the stories were amazing. I read a couple of them that the person with this idea had produced, and I was like, wow. I would definitely buy that. I sent a message to Gurley, one of the smartest guys on so many things, but marketplaces are one of them. I remember messaging him and saying, what do you think? And he just drew this little chart conceptually, which was on one axis, the producer penetration. What percent of obituary writers do you have signed on? On the other axis was the benefit to consumers. Basically, conceptually, think about it as does the service keep getting better as you penetrate deeper into the supplier pool? That line should look straight. I think he said, once you penetrate a certain amount, the marginal supplier is not going to make the service better, and that's going to happen pretty early. So you're going to get this little bump and then a flatline, and that's not a good marketplace business. He didn't talk about that concept in your episode?…

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