David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…For 20 years now, Walmart has watched and their biggest fear materialized where Amazon just grows and becomes this mega behemoth and starts stealing their business. But they can’t seem to compete because what that would involve is cannibalizing their incredible business and building a super low margin business. That might be a long-term strategy. It might be the necessary long-term strategy to stay alive, but they’re a publicly traded company. How do you tell your shareholders the next 10 years are going to be pretty rough going because we’re undercutting ourselves and building this thing that makes way less money for a long time. Super hard. In a minute we're going to grade this but man, it’s hard for Walmart out there right now. On the one hand, they spent a lot of money for something that I think at least Ben and I feel like is still going to lose to Amazon, like Walmart is still going to lose and Jet’s still going to lose. But they spent $3.3 billion, like that’s not a lot of money to Walmart. So you know, it's a shot - it's a better shot than they’d have on their own. Right, right. I was thinking about that in the lens of like how do I want to evaluate this. It definitely puts them in a more favorable position than they were, but unfortunately, I think we do evaluate on the lens of is this actually worth that much money. Where that falls flat and I think what my real position is, is you kind of have to do an expected value calculation and figure out like what do you think the chances that this thing actually succeeds are?…

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