Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, cool. I had two playbook themes that I want to highlight. One, I want to be not careful here but specific. I think this whole story really illustrates for me when you are pursuing a network effect, a network economy-based power business like Facebook is, like most social networks and the like, like Airbnb—two-sided network effects. In the beginning, what matters is getting nodes and usage on the network to start. It matters less what they are doing, more just that people come on board, and that your value grows according to Metcalfe's law. As it grows, more sets of users and use cases will come on board and it will evolve. In Bitcoin’s case—this is why I said I want to be not careful but specific—I am not in any way condoning what happened with Silk Road, that that's okay, that that should happen, or anything. But just from the perspective of value building of the network, the fact that had happened, transactions needed to start happening. Nodes needed to come on the network for users and for miners. Silk Road provided that as the first use case. Then there were more after that, one thing led to another, and now here we are. Here we are, is so radically different than what Silk Road was. But for the underlying network and the protocol, it doesn't really matter. What matters is increasing your velocity and growth of users and transactions. When I look at Facebook and when I look at Airbnb, it's actually the same story. What was Facebook in the early days—as we've alluded to—were undergraduates at colleges looking for attractive photos of other incoming undergraduates at their college. That is so different from Instagram and WhatsApp today, but that's okay. Similarly with Airbnb, what was Airbnb in the early days? It was people sleeping on air mattresses in each other's apartments. What is it today? It’s something wholly different, but the point is growing to the network. It's funny. On the one hand, yes, you are totally right. On the other hand, I'm sitting here thinking, and this is not really advice, it's just an observation. I think like many of our playbook themes if you are starting a startup David and you came to me and said, I'm going to eventually do this thing. Before that, I'm just going to do a bunch of random crap, but people are totally going to use it a lot. Eventually, once they're all using it, then I'm going to make them do this other thing. I’m going to be like, no. That’s extremely unlikely. I think there's some applicability here.…

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