Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…You could string together a number, though, and you could have a good fund. It’s been a long time since we’ve covered an acquisition on this show. Most of what we do are IPOs or just stories of great companies because now, the opportunity is to build a great company. There’s so much more capital available, not just from SoftBank, but from Sequoia, for instance, which we’ll talk about more on this season, just raised $12 billion global growth fund. So many funds, new entrants, and all sorts of things, and the goal is really find these types of ideas and build them into really large independent standalone companies. Yup. There’s a few other topics I want to touch before we go to grading. One is something we didn’t talk about but was actually a really big piece of value creation for Google Maps, which was Google Map Maker, and Lars talked about this in a talk that he gave 6–7 years ago. It’s an old YouTube video, 3000 views, but basically, in order to build out maps, especially before they had all the cars driving around with cameras really operationalized, they got a lot of their early data from relying on the passion of locals who I think were called Google guides or Google local guides, who wanted to improve digital maps for their area because they saw this dream of, “Oh my God. My area, no matter where I am in the world, should totally have a really rich, robust digital map for it.” They figured out this great system of appointing local guides and earning points. Community leaders emerged to really build the maps for their area. Totally, the power of UGC, of user-generated content business models where you can organize people to do something that benefits them. People were excited to use the maps but also have a little bit of street credential of being a local guide. Your vision is big enough and your vision is, “I want to make the world better in this way. Everyone should be able to digitally view a map of their area because of all the benefits that come with that.” You can get a crazy amount of stuff for your business for free in a sustainable, updatable way, and for a long time. Google Map Maker is not a tool anymore, but they still have variants of this with people and local communities updating information for them. You can claim your business and update all the info on it.…

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