David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yup, especially at the pace that they're doing deals now because of the peace that the whole thing is working now. Last one that I had that I thought was interesting that we didn't talk about any of this but Marc talks a lot about, which is he doesn't really believe in pivots, or the notion of failing fast, or the lean startup. I'm amenable to this argument even though I do a ton of testing of ideas. The big innovations throughout history are made by true believers who just kept trying. There's something like the filament of a lightbulb was Edison's 200th attempt at creating filament. It may not be the right decision for you as an individual to keep ramming your head against a wall, but it's good for all of us as a society that there are a lot of people who are willing to keep running at something almost illogically so in a way that is potentially not in their best interest because that is where the true breakthroughs come from. If everybody's always looking at data from the first task and they're like, yeah, it's not really working, let's try something else, then you don't get the breakthrough animations. Yup, that makes sense. I think both of these things are true, but certainly we didn't test Acquired and if we had tested Acquired in the early years, we'd probably have been well, that's not working very well. Totally, but passion projects, passion leads you to do things that aren't necessarily economic. Then at some point, you look around and you're like, whoa, value creation has happened.…

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