Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I have one too, I don't know if it's going to be the same. All right. Yesterday, on the DoorDash episode, we mentioned that with their stock pop, they’re seriously butting up against the edges of the total addressable market for takeout in the United States. In order to value them the way the market is currently valuing them, you have to believe they can expand into adjacencies and be the local real-time FedEx. For Airbnb, they have demonstrated a pattern of trying this many times over the years and failing. You have to value this company based on the market they’re actually in, not what they possibly could succeed at in the future. As I think through this, I was trying to come up with one example where they've done something outside of their bread and butter. The thing they stumbled onto in the first real year of the company that they've done well. I don't think the company is a master executor outside of that initial opportunity. It's almost like the anti-Amazon, who's really effective at testing on new adjacencies to expand into and killing the ones that don't and then leaning hard into the ones that do. They tried luxury. They tried building a hotel. They tried experiences. They’ve tried dining. They tried booking air travel. They tried custom-designed tiny homes. Were you on the Airbnb Plus listing? It’s a terrible experience.…

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