Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, right. So this is where the analogy breaks down in the physical world. It's kind of interesting. Like if you go back to a traditional version of marketplace. Like before, it was this category of VC investable businesses, it was large square footage areas where multiple merchants were in a single place. And like Blue Bottle doesn’t want to exist in a marketplace either, much like Southwest doesn’t want to invest in a travel aggregator. Like I don’t want to be seen around all that cruft. I want to be in my own little thing and separated from all that. So, I guess the tech theme I’m going with here or the theme I’m going with here is like some things are un-crammable into these business models that are massive and winner-take-all and looks super shiny from an investment perspective, and I think coffee may be one of them. Like Starbucks is killing it, they’re doing great. But like, are they the answer for everyone? No. I certainly agree with you in coffee as it exists today. But I’m thinking about like Airbnb though. Like a Holiday Inn was very different from a Ritz-Carlton, right? There were segments there for sure. But both of those experiences and both below a Holiday Inn and above a Ritz-Carlton exists on Airbnb. A platform like that actually can address if not the whole market, you know, many, many segments. Part of it is tied to maybe it’s just the nature of the coffee market, but I think it is also tied to this like physical nature of these businesses. Like you can’t do the same with coffee, right, because the experience of sitting in a Starbucks is very different from the experience of sitting in a Blue Bottle. They can’t kind of coexist.…

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