David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…You know what Tobi’s doing in his free time at this point in the programming world? Not yet. This is about to come up. They decide like, “Okay, yeah, this is great. We love snowboarding. We're going to keep going together. Let's grow a small business together that we can do to fund our habit. Maybe what we should do,” it's now 2004, Web 2. 0 is starting to become a thing, people are becoming more comfortable buying things online, Amazon's been a public company for a while now, “what if we just started a website to sell snowboarding gear and of course, because we're really elitist about this, we would never ride on mass-market stuff that you could go buy at Sports Authority or something, let's use the power of the internet. Let's find really boutique artisanal gear and only sell that online.” “Perfect. Let's do it.” They get together and Tobi codes up a website. They call it snowdevil.ca. You can go there, we’ll link to it in the show notes, it is still up. If you read the About Us section, it says, “Snowdevil is not your typical snowboard store. Instead, Snowdevil is a partnership among two riders who are only interested in selling boards and bindings that they love to ride on. Nothing else. If you want big brands like Burton or K2, you should try Walmart. If you want high-end top quality brands like Never Summer, Nidecker, Technine and others, you should try us. Yours truly, Scott and Tobi.” Then they list their personal gear setups for their snowboards. Now the funny thing, if you go to this website, they talk a big talk about how refined their taste is, but the website looks like absolute crap by today’s standards. There's some mismatch there when you're looking at it. But 2004 is a very different time on the web.…

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