David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's wild. Yeah. I've got a couple on here. We've touched on a lot already. One of the biggest ones that I wanted to talk about we already have which is the time to start experimenting and figuring out your response to the next strategic inflection point as well before that happens, but a couple of others. I want to underscore this. What does it mean to be a commodity or not be a commodity in the market? You are not going to build a long-term sustainable enduring business if you are selling a commodity. It's just not going to happen, you can start by selling a commodity and participating in a commodity marketplace, but you need to have a plan and a path to either shift the commoditization to another layer off the stack, which Intel and Microsoft did incredibly well in the PC wave, it was the manufacturers themselves that got commoditized or to introduce something about what you're doing and a product that allows you to have power over your competitors. Amazon has done this in eCommerce. There are lots of eCommerce retailers out there that compete with Amazon, but Amazon has so many features—Prime delivery, selection, or just what. They have a power advantage. That's one. The last two, these are smaller ones, but I think appropriate also for Adapting that I wanted to cover what Andy talks about. One, he says this quote, and Sequoia said this in the black swan memo, I think [...] said it in our interview with him. Andy says, "Looking back over my own career, I have never made a tough change, whether it involved resource shifts or personnel moves that I haven't wished I had made a year or so earlier." I think the Sequoia version of what they say in the black swan memo is nobody ever regrets acting swiftly or something like that. This is a good thing to keep in mind. Related to that, when Andy and Gordon ceremonially fired themselves and rehired themselves, doing something like that is so important because without some performative action like that, it can be so hard to make the decisions you need to make. It was giving themselves permission.…

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