Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay, that's a case where strength wouldn't lead to strength in the same way. But so many venture capital businesses and businesses that scale as large as we're talking about in the last few episodes. We've been talking about the largest businesses the world has ever known. It's amazing how this dynamic applies. Totally. For grading on this one, listeners, we are going to combine value creation, value capture, and grading. We already talked a lot about the component of this value creation section where how does the value created for the world compare to value destruction? I think we've talked a lot about that in this episode. We haven't spent a lot of time on how the value that Standard Oil created compared to the value that they captured for themselves, which I think is the interesting one to look at here. A terrible example is Wikipedia, where there's no company that creates any more value in the world, but captures so little of it. Whereas you look at Google, they create a lot of value, but they're enormously profitable based on it. Some interesting numbers with Standard Oil. We know that they're responsible for this kerosene boom in the United States and the world. Let's save the gas car conversation for the next episode. I absolutely want to have a conversation around climate. I think we should save that for the next episode too. Let's just look at the shape of the business by this period of time. Standard Oil in the mid-1880s, employed 100,000 people. That's probably the first time a company ever employs 100,000 people. Governments probably did, but did corporations? It would be hard to imagine, especially in a world where there are only 30 million people in the United States.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.