Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That's how we think about it. All right. I'm going to move us here into our analysis section of the show. There's a section that we always do, Sam, called Power, which is based on a book by Hamilton Helmer called Seven Powers, which is an analysis of what it is about a particular business that enables them to achieve persistent differential returns, long-term durable profitability. There are seven of these as you can imagine. There's counter positioning, typically, versus an incumbent. Scale economies, switching costs, network economies between participants in the network, process power, which is usually, we know how to do something that's simply not transferable because it's too complex, branding, and then a cornered resource. We have something that other people don't. I've been thinking a little bit about what applies here. I think a lot of FTX's success to date is because you guys have executed flawlessly, very rapidly, as Mario puts it, speedrunning the market in his piece when there's just a massively growing pie and huge amounts of opportunity opening up. I actually haven't given it a lot of thought yet too. As there becomes more and more players and more and more competition, therefore profits get arbitraged away, what is it about FTX that will enable it to be durably profitable as competition pours in? I'm curious how you think about that. I don't think the answer to that is obvious. I don't think that it's like, oh, yeah, obviously, we're good at left clicking, no one else knows how to left click. They always right click and it doesn't take them where they're trying to go. I think that part of that is you look at the breadth and to some extent, frankly, randomness, of the type of things that we've tried to do. It's a little all over the place, which I think is also a sign of it's going to fuck with some narratives. Maybe one way to think of this is, you have Amazon, right? Amazon is AWS and they have their store. I challenge you to be compelled by the narrative about what those have in common. I'm not compelled by that.…

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