YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugene Wei

lines on the record: 98
first: 2019-01-22
most recent: 2019-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“People who are super visually literate about video grammar, you know, the people who are making vines and all these things growing up. As for Hulu, you know, my time there was really interested in, you know, I had gone to film school before going to Hulu. I've always had sympathy also as an English major as an undergrad for artists and creatives, what a tough life that is. I saw there was this just huge adversarial relationship between customers and filmmakers. A lot because studios were sort of sitting in the middle of that relationship. So people would be like, you know, screwed, I'm going to pirate this movie because screw, you know, whatever, Columbia or Warner Brothers or whoever, I don't care. But if you ask most fans of any artists, they actually really are fans of the creators themselves. And so I thought with Hulu, trying to reform that industry from within to create a more customer friendly approach from the studios in terms of how to distribute that work.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be, you know, like a lot of those book deals. If you agree to a book deal, you often have to buy the first couple thousand copies yourself just to get yourself on that list. But then if you look at video, like if you look at something like the Defiant ones, if that had been a book versus that series on HBO and look at how many people watch that, if you look at how many people watch movies, TV, how many hours a day people watch TV, video is a medium that appeals to us as sort of like a visual sensory feast in a way. And so I've always thought that that was a place where I could arbitrage in that like I don't think a lot of people actually understand how to make video in tech and why would they they're never taught this and I still think video has a lot of room to penetrate a lot of markets that we currently still rely heavily on text for just especially now that smartphones all have really nice video cameras in them and you have this generation of young people”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many of those books that were sold do you think were actually read? It's a shockingly low number. It's shockingly, we just don't like to be like.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Video as a form of language isn't really taught. We're taught writing and grammar and all of this, which, and we have this very powerful cultural association with text and literacy, with knowledge and being, you know, one of the liberal elite, for example. And I think we have a sort of anti-intellectual bias against video as an art form. But actually, video is just like any communication medium sort of neutral in its base conception. It's just about how you use it. And I actually think we have plenty of evidence that indicates that video is actually way more appealing than text. You know, if you look at the number of books that are sold each year, the number of books that are read, the truth that not a lot of people like to admit is that most people don't read. Most people don't read very much. If you wonder, if you look at the New York Times bestseller list and you ask, how many copies of that book that's number one? That's totally low. Do you think we're sold?”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So we spoke earlier about my interest in different media types and sort of my sense of the power of photos and videos versus text as a communication medium. So we're already seeing that, right? We're seeing a young generation grow up that are”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Run away with that. Now there are probably a number of different ways to deal with that problem depending on line of business. Always I think the preference is to let markets sort things out, to let some competitor come along and disrupt that. But I do think there has to be some thinking done around this idea of, wow, okay, luck plus first mover equals massive network effect like runaway winner. Is that healthy? Do we want that? And how do we control that to encourage more entrepreneurs, more people to come along and innovate and do different things on top of to push sort of like progress forward, to push the markets forward?”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There to be companies that have such strong network effects that effectively shut out all competition. And you have that same effect on social networks. You have the runaway celebrities who gain so many followers that it becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think just as social networks have to grapple with that, antitrust law has to grapple with the idea of, well, what are the downstream harmful effects of companies with massive network effects? And I think the strongest argument probably you can make is that there's some element of first mover advantage combined with network effects that is partially a function of luck. And if we believe that, then we may be sort of cutting off a lot of future competition, which I think is always healthy for markets just because some company will always get lucky, will always be the first mover in some massive network effect business, and we'll always”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. That hit a billion dollars in revenue in just like no time whatsoever. And why is that? Well, we all have these smartphones that are connected to the internet at all times. We have these massively connected social networks like Facebook and Twitter that allow information and ideas to travel more quickly than ever. And so we've taken network effects, which are this sort of like concept that worked in small segments of business and just amplify it to agree we've never seen in history. And that creates these runaway winner-take-all effects, which we're still grappling with. You know, for example, there's this whole debate about antitrust. How do you deal with tech companies? It's the equivalent here. Yeah, what's like, how do you deal with it when the consumer welfare criteria for defining a monopoly actually doesn't apply to these huge network effect companies? And what do we do? Like, do we want?”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We clearly have this winner take all dynamic that is the result of a number of things that came about when the internet came about. It's funny when people used to talk about network effects back in the day, they wanted to teach what networks effects were. They would always use companies like Cisco where they would talk about the telephone network. But what we're living through now is the largest network effects businesses in the history of the world. I laugh because when I was in Amazon, one of my research projects was, hey, let's research to see if Amazon could be the fastest growing company in history by writing. It was like, turned out to be this really hard problem back then for me to actually research. I didn't even ultimately conclude what was the largest growing company. But what I do know is that since Amazon, which probably was at the time the fastest growing company in history, there have been many, many other companies that have far exceeded that hurdle. You know, you had Groupon, you had Uber, you have these companies now that...”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got to reset the game in some way. Someone new has to come along and feel like, hey, this game isn't rigged. I actually can become famous on this network also, which is a hard thing to do the way that status accumulates typically on social networks. But I think you'll start to see social networks think about that more and more over time.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea that, like Sam Hickey and I had discussed that to refresh these status games on social networks, you almost need some mechanism to clear out old money or the equivalent of old money. If you have these people on Twitter who accumulated millions of followers back in the day but no longer tweet.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that status seeking game loses some of its heat, which can be fine, I think, if the network becomes massively useful. I think, for example, on WeChat, yeah, it may not be as fun or as hot now on WeChat to compete for status. On the other hand, you can't live without it in China. You use it to pay for things, pay your bills, pay everything. And so if a social network can go really far out in the utility axis, that's almost always the path that large, large social networks have to take. I think Instagram, Snapchat, all the networks eventually are going to be like, well, the status game has gotten a little old. How do we remain relevant in the customer's eye? We have to graduate to becoming super useful in their lives. Because as you know, status games are fragile by nature. I think there's something here to the idea of, and this is.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the largest network in the world, Facebook's the WeChats, they almost always have to generalize out their proof of work function over time to attract more users. Facebook, if they had stayed at, hey, you can only post text status updates, how large do we think they would be if they had never added photos or videos or all these other things that they do? WeChat, if they hadn't expanded from messaging into doing payments and all the gazillion lines of business they're into wouldn't be as large as they are today. So you'll almost always see the largest social networks broaden out over time. The problem, of course, is that, again, status and the scarcity of status is the potential energy that governs the heat. I like to think of it just like, you know, you just know some networks are hot. They're growing quickly. Everybody's on them, competing. As you brought it out over time, as you make everything easier to do and accomplish on your network.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All social networks have this proof of work. And to tie it back to my asymptotes theory, the proof of work not only distinguish who are the winners on your platform, but it also governs the ultimate size that your network can grow. So, the problem for a musically will always be well, there are only so many teen girls in the US who are willing to dance around in their bedroom and do one of these lip sync sketches. I don't know you that well, but I don't think that's something that you spend your time doing. It's not something I would spend my time doing. There's some people who won't do that, just like there's some people who won't enjoy writing little 280 character quips on Twitter. And so every network almost by definition chooses its own size.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The funny thing is that Facebook had that from the very beginning because Facebook started off as only for people with Harvard email addresses. canonically elite institution in the United States. And you could only get into this social network if you had one of the email addresses. That meant from the beginning there was a status game in Facebook and the way it spread through the Ivy Leagues and all of that, right? And so musically was interesting. Musically came along and I thought it was an interesting case because their proof of work was different enough that there was a whole class, a whole generation of young women who are like, this is a network where I am uniquely qualified to actually win status versus some famous VC on Twitter, right? Like I'm disadvantaged on Twitter. But on musically, I can kill them in this game and I can accumulate a ton of followers. And so they migrated over to musically in mass. And so I think.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World social capital into the network and created this sense of separation, right? Remember when there was the race to the million followers? I can't remember Ashton Perry and Ashton Cushy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That energized it.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very common on Twitter now. There's like no setup. It's all contextual. It's just the punchline. And what that did was it created a status leaderboard and it turned Twitter into a game and it's the game that we play today, right? Which is get the most likes. And how do you do that? Well, there's a whole bunch of ways to do it. But back in that day, it was to write a funny one liner. And then later it became post a really interesting like fortune cookie-like thought or quip. And there's another form which is post a link to an interesting article. Now we have the quote tweet like clapback. You can dunk on like Donald Trump or somebody like that. You know, like there's all these forms, right? But what mattered was that there was a sense of status and competition embedded into the network that created all the potential energy. You know, when celebrities like Justin Bieber and those folks came onto Twitter, they brought all their inherited real”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first tweet was way back in 2006 or 7 my taxes. And then I didn't tweet again for like a year. And my next tweet was a year later and was also doing my taxes. Like no engagement. I was just like, what is this network? And people often remember that as a friendly, fun time on Twitter. But actually, that wasn't even a business. There's nothing there. There was no potential energy. So the proof of work is the structure that creates the potential energy in a network. And for me, what caused that for Twitter was the creation of these two sites. There was one called FaveStar, and I think the other was called Favored. And what they did at the time, they were like global leaderboards for tweets. They said, these are the most liked tweets across all of Twitter. And when I saw that, for the first time, I was looking at what a really good tweet looked like. And a lot of it was comedy back in the day. The style of sort of like single punchline comedy.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gets harder, right? Because there are more people competing for it. There's just less of it to give out. And so I think it's really important. Why do some social networks succeed and others don't? I think it's hard to come up with a proof of work that's unique, that can actually distinguish among a user base. Like I think you can't create a network if you don't have some proof of work that separates users out from another. Like if every person who posted on Twitter got exactly the same number of likes, like it doesn't matter what you wrote, you'll get a million likes. It wouldn't be a fun game to play. And I think back to, this goes way back. If you go back to early Twitter, its growth. And I was an early user of Twitter. Everyone was just posting kind of what were like conventional status updates. The stuff that people always joke about, like I just had, you know, a bologna sandwich for lunch and stuff. There are like very few likes.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have like a million followers or something, right? Here are people like you and me are like working hard trying to get followers these days grinding, writing these beautiful tweets. But that's never going to happen again. And that's because as networks expand over time and just as cryptocurrency gets mined more and more and there are more people.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you do so, you will mine Instagram coin. And how do you redeem that coin? It comes in the form of likes, it comes in the form of followers and comments and just sort of engagement with your work. And so you had all these people essentially mining Instagram coin by doing this. Facebook, any social network has some weird proof of work thing. If you look at musically in the beginning, musically was like, hey, how do you demonstrate proof of work here? Well, you have to create kind of a lip sync little dance sketch to these music tracks that we've licensed and posted to our feed. And just like any cryptocurrency, it's much easier to mine this in the beginning when the network is sort of young and hasn't built out. Like if you were one of the people who was on Twitter's recommended follower list way back in the day, the difference in the number of followers you have versus the next person is it's exponential. Like I know a few of those people who are on that list.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're setting up some structure where you have some proof of work hurdle. And by having your users do this proof of work, they can mine essentially what's like a social capital currency. So let's take Instagram, for example. Let's call it Instagram coin. When Instagram was created and they created this network, what was their proof of work hurdle? It was this. You have to take a beautiful, interesting square photo.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a big crypto zealot or expert by any means, but I actually think this is where crypto makes for a beautiful metaphor. So if you looked at the original Satoshi Nakamoto white paper and you look at ICOs, what's interesting is they have this proof of work hurdle, something you have to do to mine for this currency. And it just, you know, when you describe it to the normal person, they're like, this is so absolutely bizarre and weird. Why is this? And there's a number of reasons. But I actually think the parallels to starting a new social network are there in that if you start a new social network, what are you doing?”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where people have realized it's more efficient to actually compete for status in these virtual worlds than it is in real life. And that's especially true for young people. Young people before they have a job in the world, before they've gone to college and like they don't have a car, they don't have a job title. They don't own a home yet. But what they can do. Random selfie and get like 500 likes. It's an astonishing number. I will carefully compose a beautiful photo for my vacation and get maybe like a couple dozen likes. It's just, you know, they grew up in this game, this status game, and all their friends are playing it also. It's just a different world.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Text status updates and had added photos later, but it's always been a mixed medium social network. Instagram was like, oh, this is a photo-only social network. Not only is that more accessible to more people, it's more appealing to young people, I think. And so essentially, what I said in my invisible asymptotes piece was that Instagram is a photo entirely composed of advertisements, you know, not just the official ads, but all the photos that we take and post of our lives. This is the meal I just ate. Look at this beautiful place. I just went on vacation. Look at what my husband or wife just got me for my birthday. Look at what my kids made me breakfast and bread for Father's Day or Mother's Day. All these things are a little advertisements of our life. And so the things that people say that are both good and bad about social media all stem from this is that we have these massive, massive networks.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Camera's built in the bed. Nothing else except the camera. I think visual language would be sort of the first language for most people in the world rather than text. That's not to say text doesn't have its advantages in many ways. It's just that photos are, you know, they say a photo is worth a thousand words. There's some truth to that. You can express a lot in a photo with your face, the expression. And so if you look at a young person and how they message their friends and you count up the percentage of them that our photos or videos like snaps versus text messages, and then you do that same thing for an older generation like my generation, you'll see that's almost exactly the opposite. Young people mostly use photos and everything to communicate old people tend to tap out a text message on a virtual keyboard. And so I think Instagram just came along at the right time where they jumped to that transition. You know, Facebook had started with.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, you know, Facebook before that, or Snapchat, or any of these things, you realize that almost every post could be described as a form of signaling in one way, shape, or form. Instagram, by being sort of photos only, I think speaks to the most efficient way for young people to seek out status in the world. Snapchat is another thing that's interesting, which we should talk about afterwards. But I think that we have a younger generation which grew up with smartphones that have a camera in it by default. So they have a camera with them at all times. I think the behavior shift is monumental and it's something that's just not discussed often enough, which is that young people realize that communicating quickly is most efficiently done by a photographer or video and not by writing text. I actually think if you go back to Caveman days and you had given cavemen these smartphones with”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think quarter all of that is first understanding and believing in, and I think most people believe this is that humans are a social creature and that we are status seeking by nature. A lot of signaling theory derives just from that very simple observation. And I have more thoughts on this, which will probably be the subject of my next post. But if you consider the history of humanity and how we sought out status in different social structures through our job, in our family, you know, at school, and all those different things, we had one set of sort of contained surface areas in which we would pursue higher status. What the internet and social media has done essentially is they've increased the surface area of status seeking to a digital realm, a virtual realm, and vastly expanded that surface area. So when you look at young people on Instagram or”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Protect companies there. I saw posters of him, quotes from him hanging in most of the major tech companies, hallways and elevators, because I think they are very sort of Amazonian.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's just go solve them. And so I think there is that in common. And it wasn't surprising to me when I was in China that Jeff Bezos is kind of the patron saint.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the customer need, and how do we solve that? And in a lot of the lines of business that they're in, there is usually a very practical answer to that question in each line of business that they're in. And Amazon has always had as its mission to be the world's most customer-centric company. So there is this sort of like deep attuned focus to what the customer needs and wants, which is a little different, I think. from the approach of genius inventor in a room thinking of something that the customer doesn't even realize they want and coming up with something from scratch which i also think is a is a beautiful story and we love those stories of individual geniuses like the steve jobs of the world that just figure out this is what customers need before they even need it but the other type of business is often seen i think is less sexy where you're just like hey here's a bunch of customer needs they're very obvious”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one thing that's interesting about Amazon and also a lot of Chinese tech companies, for example, is that they're in many lines of business. We don't tend to see that much in the American tech scene. Most American tech companies, even the largest ones, focus on a couple sweet spots. Amazon is the closest to some of these Chinese tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba and whatnot, which seem to be in a gazillion lines of business. You know, when I was over in China, I met with some folks from a company over there called Mei Tuan, which kind of started as like a groupon clone type of business and now has over 200 lines of business. You know, they have drones that were kind of food delivery, robots. They have like a Yelp-like site that, you know, it's just like movie tickets, you know, all sorts of just disparate businesses, like kind of like an old school conglomerate. And if you look at Amazon, they're like that also. And I think there's just this sort of very pragmatic focus on.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chatted about Twitter earlier. That was one of the companies I used as an example. Actually, I think the interface of Twitter, the style of its presentation of its content, is hugely, massively appealing to a certain type of person. But on the flip side, it's also very, very unappealing to another set of people. And so there are a number of other examples that I go through, but I think that's just the most important thing is that. So appealing and perfectly tuned for product market fit for the segment that we selected to. But it's exactly built incorrectly for all the other people who don't use it.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of different companies that I thought were hitting different invisible asymptotes. And one reason I think the concept is important is if you identify the wrong cause of that flattening of your growth, you will chase a bunch of solutions that will have no effect on your business. And I think one of the most powerful things that any business can do is to clearly figure out why their growth flattened, why certain people don't use your product. And it's often very different than what you think. And the reason is that when we hear from customers that do use our product and why they love our product, it's just so flattering to hear that type of thing. And they're often resonates with our own belief of our own product's value because we are also usually customers for the products we build. And the thing is that can deceive you because those very reasons might be exactly the reasons why other people don't like your product.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other side of customers were those who had never bought from Amazon at all. And obviously to figure out what your total addressable market is, you have to understand why people don't buy from you. Most companies in the Valley nowadays do a lot of market research panels, surveys, focus groups. And there is a tendency to focus on, well, look at these people who do use our product. Let's listen to what they're saying. And I'm actually always fascinated by the people who don't use your product. I think there's just much more to learn from the people who don't use your product and to figure out in your mind how to segment the market into people who will use your product and won't. But the concept of the invisible asymptote is just that there is something that causes you to hit that top shoulder in the S-curve. And it's often invisible to you, but is an asymptote on the growth of your business. And without figuring out what that is, you won't ever break through that barrier. And so I talked about a number.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why does that happen? And how does that happen? So I wanted to write about it. And my piece really, you know, what brought it up to me was very early on at Amazon when we had done surveys of customers. And we surveyed two sets of customers. One customers that did buy from us. We actually wanted to know why they didn't buy more from us.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The concept of invisible asymptotes is just that in business we traditionally speak of successful businesses as going through what's called the classic S-curve. So in the beginning, you're sort of like you're not growing really. And then you figure out some product market fit and your business starts growing sharply. And so that's sort of the bottom starts to go up in that classic hockey stick style. And then eventually businesses grow slow. And we have a lot of talk and a lot of cases and a lot of people obsessing over how to get that initial product market fit because that's something that almost all startup entrepreneurs struggle with. And it's very hard most new businesses fail. I had been at companies which had grown up and gone past product market fit and then had hit the top shoulder of the S-curve where the growth flattened. And I just didn't feel like enough people spent time thinking about.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Salespeople will tell you, you know, you're selling to that person, not your pitch. But as salespeople go in and they don't just go into some spiel, they're actually trying to understand the client and what their needs are first. And they're adapting the story to that. Just the same way that salesperson in Milan did to me. And I think in tech, we have this obsession these days with big data. If you just get enough data, you just crunch enough of it, you will just figure out what people want. And I just think that we often lose sight of the idea that there are other paths to making the sale or satisfying a customer need that take a different approach that aren't like deterministic from big data.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And brought out this sport coat, which I looked at and I was like, well, that pattern's a little bold. I don't know if that's quite me, but she had me try it on in front of a mirror. And then she started talking about why it fits so well, you know, how it spoke to a certain part of my personality that she had sensed in just chatting with me. You know, I know that I was being sold on something. And yet it was just so polished a presentation and so convincing that after whole spiel, I was like, you know, I really do want to own this forecoat. And so I ended up buying it. And, you know, when I was at Hulu, I would go on sales calls sometimes with our ad reps. And, you know, when you go on a sales call with the best sales rep on your team, it's absolutely a great lesson in what sales is all about. This whole idea that they say in poker, play the player, not the cards.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if I was in Milan for the first time a couple years back, and I was traveling through Italy for five weeks, and everyone had told me Milan is kind of the fashion capital, I had wanted to go there really just to go see an opera at La Scala. But I decided to also walk around to all the luxury stores and just check them out since that was such a huge part of them. I mean, they were all over. They line the streets there. The thing about these high-end luxury boutiques is when you walk in, there's very little clothing on display. I mean, these stores are very minimalist. And I walked in and I was convinced that I wasn't going to buy anything. I didn't really see anything that looked like anything I would wear. And this salesperson walked up to me and she's like, oh, you know, what are you looking for? And I was like, well, I don't really know. I just kind of walking around and checking out the town. And she started chatting with me, just sort of looking me up and down. And she was like, you know, I have a thing that I think you might.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best thing ever, right? You know, the whole idea that bad publicity, there's no such thing as bad publicity usually holds. And that's one great example of it. So I think. That I thought was interesting from that documentary was just what separates some experts and people, what's a way to identify talent. And I was always just struck by how Dre was listening to these demo tapes and found Eminem. He heard the tape and he was just like, wait, stop, who is that? Let's fly this person out. And you hear that. And obviously there's selection bias in these stories in hindsight. But I've seen it enough in business and other venues where I do think there's something to that. There are certain people with that gift for spotting talent in a crowd or spotting something distinctive that stands out. And in the arts world where you might argue that it's just sort of a lottery style distribution of outcomes, if you had that little bit of edge, it would be a huge advantage.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything like that. So Jimmy was like, hey, we've got to make our headphones look hot. We've got to look different than all these other headphones. And so today, you know, if I go on a plane and I see someone walk on with a pair of beats headphones around their neck, I always recognize them from a distance. That's important. But second, he's like, let's borrow from the cultural scarcity of all these famous musicians and stars that I know. I need to get these headphones into pictures onto as many famous people as possible. And he did that. And so in the documentary, all these musicians are complaining about, oh my gosh, Jimmy, with his headphones, I'd go to a meeting with him and he'd be like, wait, wait, before you leave, put these headphones out. I'm going to take a picture of you and post this to Instagram or, you know, and share this out publicly. And it was brilliant. In fact, Beat's headphones got banned by some of the sports leagues.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before then, it really was like a relatively small market, not a lot of differentiation in market share, no clear leaders. And so I think Jimmy, with his marketing expertise, his great insight was, well, hey, we have to make these things culturally significant, status signifiers. And if you look at them, they really should be that. Apple recognized this even before Beats with their marketing for the original iPods. How did they do it? They marketed these silhouette images and these posters with these white headphones because that was the most distinctive thing. If you look at the things that are the best status signifiers for humans, it tends to be those things that are most visible that we have on us at all times for women. It can be purses, right? Because you're always carrying it on you. And so it's always visible. Headphones are very visible, especially the white Apple ones, which stand out in sharper relief against clothing.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One meta point was just that I think more things that might only be books in another lifetime should be turned into small videos or documentaries, especially if they involve very charismatic and famous people. So a couple things about the Defiant ones. One was just around the marketing of Beat's headphones, the whole conception of it. So, you know, prior to Beats, people who were headphone nerds might debate the, you know, like frequency rolloff of high-end headphones and all of that. And so I was really struck by the scene where, you know, Dr. Dre and Jimmy were trying to figure out, hey, what's the state of the art and headphones right now? And they assembled a whole table full of all the leading headphones. And they're trying them on and to paraphrase, they were basically like, these things look terrible. I would not want to wear one of these things. I don't know why anyone would buy one of these. And if you look at the high-end headphone market.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a badge of honor that you can hold out. It's a scarce accomplishment. And so I think that we will always continue to fight that battle because humans are status-seeking by nature. And so we're always trying to find that thing that gives us the edge over another person when it comes to status. And food has really become that for many people.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are really scarce. You know, the French laundry or, you know, if you take any three-star Michelin restaurant, they usually only have two seatings at night, only a certain number of people can roll through that. And so for you to be able to say, hey, I went and had that meal.”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who the chef is behind a particular restaurant and all of that. And my notion there was just that we are constantly in this cultural battle to find sources of scarcity. And, you know, music and music experiences used to be more scarce. You know, I remember an age when I would try to collect rare LPs or things like that, you know, be like a huge find if you went to some weird record store and some weird small city and found one of these mythical LPs that you couldn't find easily music like concerts and things like that where these coveted tickets that you would go to and all of that and that age, you know, music just wasn't reproduced the way it is now. But now we live in an age of Spotify and there were the CDs before that, which is just printed in mass. And so it no longer became hard to track down any piece of music. Whereas food experiences, especially at the high end,”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was inspired by a podcast I had heard about this book, Cuisine and Empire. I had just realized that when I was younger, music really felt like it was the heart of culture in America. Music was where young kids turned to express their sense of rebellion, to protest things like the Vietnam War. Music was punk rock and all of that was the way that people sort of would choose bands and music to express their point of view on the world. And I realized that now, you know, food has sort of become that for a variety of reasons. One is, you know, certainly the advent of the internet and television channels like the food network started to make celebrity chefs into celebrities. You know, we used to only know the names of restaurants growing up, but nowadays you can talk to many people who are into food. They'll be able to name”
2019-01-22 · Invest Like the Best · Eugene Wei – Tech, Media, and Culture - [Invest Like the Best, EP.118] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source