David Rosenthal: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes, absolutely. Officially. But it’s interesting too to think about this. I’m thinking about this question of building a big company on the back of somebody else’s platform and I think perhaps you could make an argument that you can do it if you can essentially raid the platform, get all the users from it and then migrate to your own platform. So like I’m thinking about Pinterest grew really fast in the early days for a bunch of reasons, but one of them being that – I don’t know if folks remember – they really figured out viral Facebook user acquisition. I was getting messages all the time, emails from Facebook of “My friend Ben has joined Pinterest. Do you want to join as well?” Those users of Pinterest were successfully able to migrate those users over to their own ecosystem. Now I’m thinking about PayPal back in those early days when it really was just eBay that was the primary use case. I don’t think they were migrating anybody from using PayPal to settle their eBay transactions to them doing peer to peer money exchange, which is the big business that PayPal has built over time. But would they have been able to do that successfully had they not been part of eBay? I don’t know. Yeah, the companies that have done that well have been really sneaky about it and have succeeded and flown out of being crushed like just in the nick of time. A good example is actually LinkedIn, right? They grew on the back of stealing your entire address book and then emailing everyone.…

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