Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It actually is really, really good. The rabbit hole for one quick second because I think it's something really important there. People get a lot of cognitive dissonance looking at the venture market and financing, where they’re like, there's no plan. How did you guys have no plan to raise all this money? You need to plan. But you had the key point there. If you're financing a project in the context of a movie or a traditional game studio went out, yeah, you need a plan. Because there's a set amount of money and you need a set of return on that afterwards. But that's not what venture is about. Venture is about the long-term, asymmetric, uncap-upside potential. Oftentimes, the way you can best realize that is exactly by not having a plan and by attempting like, oh shoot. The VR market dried up. What are we going to do? We got to find that growth. Well, we're gonna go to screens, et cetera. Nick, the way we're going to do grading, since we're not grading a transaction here, is to speculate. What does the A scenario for Rec Room look like three years from now? I think there's an obvious F scenario. Those are less interesting because lots of numbers could go to zero, and anything multiplied by zero is bad. What's the B- scenario? What worries you, like stagnation or how does things sort of just plateau? But before we get there, let's talk about the A+. What in the world happens for this thing to just go gangbusters? If you look at the video game space, there's a couple of video games that have transcended video games. They are part of popular culture—Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox, Mario. Everybody knows what these things are. They have impacts well beyond gaming. I think that's what the A scenario for Rec Room is. We have grown into a space where Rec Room can have a positive impact well beyond gaming, it can have an impact on what digital entrepreneurship looks like, it can have an impact on what the future of digital events look like, what the future of the metaverse looks like. That's the space that I'm most interested in. It's not really a financial outcome and it's not really a valuation, or we've IPO’d, or we've made X number of dollars. It's really like, what is the lasting impact that the brand and the product that we have built has beyond the gaming space? I think that's really what I focus on.…

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