David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Absolutely, and I think about it as you think about the far future of how the world of restaurants reorganize, given you now have this participant in the system or the set of participants in the system that are gobbling up all the consumer attention and the default way to order food. As the default shifts from that real world to online, whether it's DoorDash or you're using Prime Now to have stuff delivered, they're going to start eating or they already are eating the profit of that local business or store and for the vast majority of local businesses without a differentiated offering other than store location, which is how most businesses used to differentiate, DoorDash will totally eat them and they'll actually eat their back end, too in the same way that Prime Now has a warehouse like DoorDash will eventually have warehouses for the most commonly purchased things and be able to capture some more of that margin. Then only the restaurants who deliver unique products or a unique experience will actually be in a good position as the world continues to reorganize. It's the same thing Amazon did to ecommerce is going to happen in food. Yup, I agree with all that, I don't think this is brand power in the Hamilton sense. That is a consequence of economies of scale and then growing into network economies, which I think they maybe have a little bit of now. But I do think, as what you're saying happens, that it'll grow more than more of a network effect as they have all the consumers and all the restaurants for now but let's say suppliers with large local businesses on the other end. To me, for a brand to be a power, it has to be like Tiffany's. That's the canonical thing where I'm willing to pay more for these exact same commodities simply because of the brand name on it and there's no way that applies to DoorDash, no way. If Uber Eats gave it to me cheaper or for the same. You're absolutely right on that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.