Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think David and Jeff considered music and CDs as well. I suspect this is probably the reason they decided to go with books. Actually, Brad quotes Jeff in The Everything Store, "With that huge diversity of products—3 million books in print—you could build a store online that simply could not exist in any other way. You could build a true superstore with exhaustive selection and customer value selection." Borders and Barnes & Noble say they're book superstores, but I think they only stocked 80,000 or so titles, which is a lot, but it's not 3 million. It's not the infinite shelf space of the Internet. Also worth noting, Barnes & Noble and Borders each only had less than 12% of the retail market each, so it's not like there was somebody who already had 80% market share that you had to go fight. You ostensibly could reasonably quickly become Barnes & Noble or Borders scale. David, you said something important there which is that only with the Internet could you really build this true superstore. Bezos keys on this very quickly in the very first interview that he gave which we'll link to in the sources. It was actually at a conference in Seattle. Someone just interviewed him right outside the conference. I think people have probably seen this video or screenshots of this video. It's worth watching the whole few minutes because it's unbelievably prescient. He basically points out that if you can do something in the old paradigm, you should. When there's a new paradigm like the Internet, you basically want to find things that you could not do any other way in order to really exploit the power of the new paradigm. Oh, that's such a great playbook theme that we can highlight here. I'm thinking about Web3. It's so obvious. You can build stuff in Web3 that you can do in Web2. That's fine, but really, you want to find the stuff that you can't do otherwise.…

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