Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's the last cool thing about this, which is that thanks to Substack, podcasting, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, it's never been easier. You don't need NBC. You don't need Universal Music Group. In fact, they might hold you back. Anybody can publish anything on the Internet. All right, this one is reasonably self-explanatory, but it's another Bezosism. In the very first shareholder letter in 1997, he wrote, “Because of our emphasis on the long term,” and people probably might know how to recite this by heart at this point, “we may make decisions and weigh trade-offs differently than some companies. We will focus on growth with an emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth, because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model.” This is absolutely Bezos' way of basically saying, if you're not on my bus, get off, because this is what we're doing. They stayed true to their word for 20 years without turning a profit. As we talked about earlier, you could argue they still wouldn't be profitable today if it weren't for AWS. They've reinvested every dollar of the retail business for two decades. There is zero chance that they would have been able to execute the strategy that they did if it weren't for their ability to be loud and proud about their intentions. As we sort of drift toward the close here, I'll be a little bit less bashful about Acquired's specific examples. I've wanted to highlight other businesses, but this one is sort of too close to home. We're obsessed with this idea of treating our audience like they're smart. This wasn't the fastest path to growth, because I think we could have listened to what everyone told us. Podcast episodes need to be a half hour. Podcast episodes need to drop every single week, so you keep this content cadence. But we wanted to be weird on the Internet about something, and we wanted to basically be unabashed about it. I'd say that the people that we get to interact with now in the community and all the folks that we met here who mentioned, oh, I've listened to the show, we ended up with exactly the listeners that we wanted and the people that we want to spend time with, because there is a long game to play. If you're saying, if you don't want to be on the bus with us, that is fine. Please get off as soon as possible. Indeed, which is the perfect lead-in to our final lesson from seven years of Acquired. Speaking of getting on the bus, we all need to do that to go to the party. What are we going to do at the party? We're going to have fun. That is what this is all about. If you can find something that you can do with your business, with your life, where you have genuinely have fun doing it, and for other people who do the same thing, it's work, you are going to run farther, longer, faster, and better than everybody else. There's actually another takeaway to this. We put an image of us and our friends, Packy McCormick and Mario Gabriele at our Arena Show the other week up here. It was just such a blast. This whole thing, this whole journey has been so fun. But one, you're going to work harder than people for whom this is work. Bill Gurley makes this great point in his Runnin' Down a Dream talk, which we've talked about on Acquired. Everybody should go watch that on YouTube. The other point is that it's so much easier to evangelize, grow, market and have people attracted to whatever it is you're doing if you genuinely have joy in doing it. Joy is not something you can really fake. That's our biggest lesson. We have had such a blast during these past seven years. We've gotten to meet amazing folks like Patrick and Brent, the whole Capital Camp team. We're just so thankful.…

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