David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…ack at them is incredibly powerful. I could probably do a whole another segment on everything Sarah Tavel has taught me. Everything she puts out is like a tool kit to be messed with and thought about. Maybe the last one I'll close with is one of my all-time favorites, which is another venture investor named Josh Wolfe who runs Lux Capital and his idea of the directional arrow of progress. Which is one of the most obvious ideas after the fact that you can encounter, which is basically just like a lot of these technology trends are plotting. You can see what's going to happen based on what's happened in the past. In my world, the cost of a commission for a trade-in, a brokerage account is a great example of this. You can just see technology making that cost go down every couple of years, and Robinhood's genius was they said, let's extrapolate this directional arrow to its endpoint and go to zero. Let's jump the line. I think jumping the line on these directional arrows or progress is a really interesting way to generate business ideas. In many ways, that's what we're trying to do with Canvas. We've learned so much from covering China tech on Acquired. That's one thing that really strikes me. The difference between the Chinese startup tech and venture ecosystem is that's the primary thing that I think people think about over there. What's the trend? What's the plot? Where is it going to end up? That's not as common here in the West, but should be. When you meet these people—I'm choosing one. I realize that wasn't brief—trying to just distill something down. There are 10 of those per person often. That's the most fun part of this whole thing is just trying to extract these ideas.…

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