Providing value

- The defining element of businesses that stick around that withstand bubbles, are at some sort of duhism level, that they provide something valuable to people. And I'm not, I said it's a duhism because, well, yeah, compared to what? Compared to companies that don't provide anything to people, of course they're gonna die. The difficult part is at the point you're starting a company, who truly knows what will be valuable? Right? And this is the hard part. So let's look at some classic examples. One would be Twitter. So, you know, eight, 10 years ago when Twitter started, if I had said to you, "Well, I'm gonna enable you "to send out 140 character message to "the cloud, the crowd, you know, the internet, "the web and you can tell people "your cat rolled over, that the line at Starbucks "is long, that the weather in Santa Barbara is great." You'd have said, "Guy, first of all, I have chat, "I have email, I can already do that "kind of stuff. "And second of all, even if I didn't have the ability "to do that, who cares if somebody's cat rolled over, "who cares if the line at Starbucks is long." You would have never invested in Twitter. So what I learned is, you know, you just never know. Now, with hindsight you can say, "Well, Twitter provided a very valuable service." In effect, it democratized journalism, it democratized the ability for crowds to communicate, it provides real value, right? And that's true but, again, take yourself back 10 years, would you have predicted this? I don't think so.