YouSaid · the spoken record

John Collison

lines on the record: 84
first: 2020-06-16
most recent: 2020-06-16
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

“It's certainly useful to study investing because what is it, but the act of allocating capital to the most productive uses? And that is what the stock market does. I think that's what the American stock market does a remarkably good job of doing is this incredibly efficient engine for allocating capital to the most productive uses. When you're running a small company, that's not really what you're doing. And I remember the first time I read the book, Outsiders, you've presumably read of these case studies of eight different CEOs that did remarkable jobs of capital allocators. Remember the very first time I wrote that book, it didn't really resonate. And the reason was because Stripe is a small company and we're only just, we're doing one thing. And so I don't get this book. We're just working on our business. As the business grows, what happens is you have multiple different investment opportunities. And then it becomes very like investing, where again, the name of the game is allocating scary.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down to the root cause. And that's proved from a product development point of view, that's proved really useful for getting the right products out there. And so, I mean, to give you a trivial example, when we started Stripe, we were told many times that it was not possible to offer instant setup for a product like this. And so again, imagine Stripe, part of the value is that you can come along in five minutes, sign up for a Stripe account and get up and running. Many people within the banking industry and payments industry told us, well, for compliance checks and underwriting and AML and various scary sounding acronyms, it was just simply not possible. And I think the rigor piece comes from continuously chipping away at why is that the case? What's the underlying reason? Where is this written down, but kind of constantly drill bitting? And that's something that we broadly try to teach from a product development perspective of its tripe, because that sort of...”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we talk a lot about rigor, and this shows up, I think, in different places, in different formats. But a lot of what we're doing, there's no playbook for it. It's interesting, I mean, as you look at any business, what are the parts of their business where they can just take the best practice from everywhere else versus what are the parts of the business where you genuinely have to invent and genuinely be novel. And in our case, certainly the API for Stripe, a huge amount of the internal payments engine, that's new and requires invention. And so as you go work on that, there's probably a thicket of existing ways that it happens, beliefs people have about it that may or may not be true and may or may not serve you. And so what we've tried to get is having people five whys the problems that they're working on and really get”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic one is still, I mean, I do a lot of editing of written materials at Stripe and I still find myself leaning on the, it must be a cliche at this stage, but the how would you explain this to your friend in a bar, presumably wouldn't in this day and age you're not allowed to go to bars, but how would you explain it to your friend over Zoom, say? And people somehow adopt a voice that is full of complex filler corporate jargon when writing in a corporate environment. And then if you ask, what does Stripe Radar actually do? Oh, it prevents fraud for businesses. Why don't you just say that? I found that as a really useful device. Another device I tend to use is get people to read something and then just tell me everything they can remember for us.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reader, not trying to dumb things down for someone who isn't familiar or something like this, you are speaking to an intelligent person who is busy but knows what they're talking about, knows what they're doing, and it's your job to kind of help educate them on this. We've certainly made that a big part of the culture early on. And I think, I mean, like any culture, it's self-perpetuating. I think people for whom that's important tend to be drawn to it.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great philosopher Patty 11 said, Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. I'm not sure I go quite as far as Patrick, but it is a pretty important part of the culture. And we're always shocked that the returns to writing well are really high. And it feels like the world hasn't fully internalized that. Certainly when you have a 3,000 person global company as Stripe is, you're going to need to do lots of asynchronous communication and also, obviously not everything is going to the entire company, but generally documents have many more readers than they have writers. And so it behooves you to put time into peer communication. And so we have always been shocked to the degree of the underemphasis that people place on kind of crisp written communication. And we try to do that both internally in artifacts and externally, where we often talk about this on, say, the marketing side or something like that, that one of our principles when it comes to doing marketing at Stripe is that we speak up to”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find it much more enjoyable to work at a company that's moving quickly rather than working for IBM. And so we really think about speed as a quality of life improvement of working at strength.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly from a technology point of view to be able to build highly scalable products for that. Google similarly I think could do a good job of bringing to bear all the in-house technology they've built that is oftentimes quite a bit better than maybe the open source alternatives that are available and using that to drive product development. And so what we think about with Stripe as we grow is, I mean, there's some elements in which we're operating in a business that benefits from scale, but you cannot have that be an excuse to let your guard down. You constantly have to be testing yourself, checking yourself like the military runs exercises. You need to be confident that you can really quickly roll out products for two reasons. One is there's a business need to actually be able to do it and oftentimes in certain parts of our business we are competing with startups. The second is that I actually think people find it much employed.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That helped us while Vashla is the dominant paradigm. I think when the paradigm changes, that's when speed is of the essence and speed is a really defensible trait in companies. And so now, okay, it's all about browsers or it's all about mobile. The question is, how good are you these days at really quickly building an operating system? Because it turns out to in mobile, that's what has to be the case. And by the way, I think the common narrative is just that it's a fairly simple regression with size where small startups are fast and large companies are slow. I don't think that's necessarily the case at all, where I think Facebook's a good example of a company that's really remarkable at executing quickly from a technology point of view. And they've been fairly determined in a new trend will come along, say live video, and Facebook will decide this is something that we want to own as part of our platform and execute very”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Custom integrations with the local Malaysian bank transfer system, and they actually are now friends with the people, the engineers at the local Malaysian bank transfer system, because it's still a work in flight itself. And so they're kind of working with them on some of the functionality that's needed. And so that way, if you have someone, a listener who's from Malaysia, they can pay the way that they're used to doing so, not just with credit card, but with a bank account in Malaysia. Stripe as engineers in Ireland who are similarly the French local card switch is actually different to visa mastercards and you need to be able to support that to be able to properly serve French customers. And so we've just been shocked the degree to which if you want to be able to reach every global customer, there really are very large economies of skill with that. All that said, I think where it gets interesting is when you have technology shifts that happen, where again Microsoft had very nice lock-in and network effects with its operating systems business.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you look at what's required in operating, payments is a business where you make literally pennies on a per transaction basis and you have to have an enormous number of them to actually be able to operate with any modicum of profitability. And you would not believe, I mean, it's fairly obvious that it's a fixed cost business and then you need to get enough business flowing through you to make the economics work. I think what's interesting is as things have moved online, the fixed costs have gone way up compared to what was needed to run a domestic-only payments business. If we think about just again, going back to the invest like the best premium model where you had access to exclusive content for smart people that Patrick interviews are only available on the paid product. And so as we think about that business, and again, what just Stripe has to do to unlock the payment system for that, we have engineers who are based in Singapore. They have built”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we started, a lot of people told us that payments is a scale business. You'll never make it, Son, and only the very large companies can survive. We were like, no, no, no, you don't realize things are different, whatever. Now that we've gotten a chance to actually become familiar in our operating, we're like, wow, this really is a scale business in that as we...”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second is just one trend we pay a lot of attention to is in which industries do the incumbents get good at digital faster than the digital native companies can grow? And in which companies do the digital native companies just outpace all the incumbents and not give them a chance? And so obviously Amazon, we can call that the digital native one. Netflix versus Disney, that's actually maybe a bit more of an even battle. We see a ton of our Warby Parker, obviously one of the very famous original successful digital native e-commerce success stories where they took an advantage they have of operating online, which is the lower cost structure they're able to deliver due to the direct consumer model in such a way that the incumbents actually can't really follow them. That's true Christensen disruption. But we spend a lot of time thinking about which of the industries that go which ways because it's not all this obvious to tell Heinz.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that people love to argue about is I haven't fully made my mind up on how I think about it, but I think it is very interesting, is what happens to the dominance of Silicon Valley in that we've certainly made a lot of over time, Patrick and I moved to Silicon Valley to start Stripe. I think that was really beneficial for the company and where it was then. Over time, the company has been growing much more outside of Silicon Valley than within Silicon Valley. And so most people at Stripe are actually not based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last year, we actually tripled the number of remote engineers of the company, but now a very significant fraction of the engineering core, but especially with COVID and companies making a temporary move to the cloud essentially. I think this is a really interesting debate as to how much of that is permanent. And certainly as we look at what's happening with our customers with how we work, it doesn't feel like it's going to go back to the same equilibrium as it had before.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting products that they would never have had a big enough audience for that product in Limerick, Ireland, but if they can address a global audience, then there's actually a pretty big total audience for that product. And so we get really excited about the increased specialization, the benefit that it delivers to upstarts for their speed is actually an advantage. Those feel like trends worth bet”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, literally India to Venezuela to the Gaza Strip, I mean, you name it. We've probably seen people building businesses on strike there. I grew up somewhere that can charitably describe the middle of nowhere in Ireland. And I feel like the internet was a really big part of getting to where I am today. And so again, we get really excited about commerce moving online as a global equalizer and delivering more opportunity. That's certainly one. The second is just more innovation as you shake things up a little, change the distribution channels. I mean, over the top is a term originates in media, but I think you can apply it to lots of things, the idea of going over the top of the existing distribution channels, the existing gatekeepers, the existing strictures. We see a ton of over-the-top e-commerce where people starting stores, they have a product they're passionate about, and now they consult to people all over the world. As a result, you're seeing more niches possible.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But imagine showing that to somewhere in the 1950s their brain might have exposed. Or similarly with smartphones, I think people thought that it's going to be, okay, salespeople are going to be able to do more email on the road and you're not predicting Uber. And so similarly with us, we think a lot about what are the exciting second order effects of more commerce moving online. I think some of those we're already seeing. One is more globalization. We see this all the time with Stripe, but with Stripe Atlas, as you mentioned, which makes it even easier to start a company. We're trying to lower the barriers to creating a company. And in particular, we're doing something where we're making it really easy for anyone to start a Delaware company in the US, even no matter where they themselves happen to be. But that means you get way more people in countries that are not, the United States or Western Europe or somewhere like that, able to participate really meaningfully in the Internet economy. And so we've seen all sorts of interesting businesses built on Stripe from”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 60s. What are the effects going to be of computers getting faster? Presumably you'd say, well, banks are going to be able to run their calculations faster and airlines are going to be able to handle even more routes in their route calculation computers. You'd look at what computers were already used for and just kind of project that forward more and faster. You would never forecast video games. I mean, to someone in the 50s, it would seem absurd the notion that you could have so much excess computing power and it's so cheap that we're just going to use this for this wildly wasteful rendering of triangles. I don't know if you saw the Unreal 5 demo”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, just like people kind of had a hard time believing that we weren't done with the payment systems that we had at the time. Similarly, I think people don't really intuit that, I mean, if you look at the raw numbers, the internet economy is a very small fraction of the overall economy, 5%, 6%, something like that. The vast majority of economic activity is not internet enabled. I think it's fairly clear to all of us that that is going to flip. We're going to end up with actually a majority that's internet enabled. But that means we're really at a shockingly early point in that sigmoid growth curve. The thing that gets me excited, and one of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about at Stripe and trying to drive is what the second order effects are of that shift. And that I think people spend lots of time thinking about first order effects of technology changes. And so if you were an analyst looking at the growth of computers in the 50s,”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And so you just want to be able to accept money from people all around the world. There actually are historically have been, certainly when we started Stripe, no good ways for you to do that. And so that is the problem that we set out to address. And it's been really fun, as you can tell, I mean, weirdly, I've ended up passionate about this problem. We get really excited about kind of the long-term second-order effects that it drives, but we've been expanding Stripe a lot by not just building this global economic interconnectivity, but actually over time handling more and more of the tasks that businesses find themselves faced with. But that's really how we got our start, the fact that it's really hard to accept payments on the internet.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You also made a paid invest like the best. And I presume your audience is relatively global. Do you actually know the audience competition?”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Southeast Asia especially, and that hasn't happened quite as much as people expected, certainly not with those companies. And so in India, for example, you actually have the government taking a very active role in technology development, which is certainly for people in the United States is not something they expect to see or at least see work, but it's worked quite well. So Ad Harve is the first their identity scheme and then UPI, which is their kind of universal payments interface, really, really cool, interoperable and kind of built on top of a real-time switch for payments. And so that's a different system still. You don't even have to go that far afield. If you look at somewhere like the Netherlands, people online there don't actually buy with a visa mastercard. They predominantly use this thing called Ideal, which is a local Dutch bank transfer mechanism. And so the reason I bring all that up is if you want to start an internet business, say you wanted to start podcast monetization as the hip topic.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Access to the internet, especially with all the recent smartphone growth. And it's highly interoperable. We're all, I mean, with some exceptions, we're all using the same internet. You can WhatsApp your friend in South Africa or Pakistan or India and the whole thing just works. Now if you look at the systems we have for economic exchange, basically we have a highly complex heterogeneous and increasingly fractured and fracturing landscape. And so in the United States, people rely kind of mostly on credit cards, except for there's lots of places where bank debits or checks are the primary way of working in China, as a lot of people like to talk about there was a lot of Chinese union paper growth credit cards early on, but that has since all flipped over to Alipay, WeChat, things like that. In India, threely different, people were really predicting the growth of the Chinese super app model all across Asia.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was hoping you were going to provide the crash course and payments. I'm still figuring it out I mean, that's seriously, but we can talk about how the industry works. I mean, the first thing that I think you have to step back and realize is just how crazy, inefficient, and immature payments on the internet still are. And that sounds like a funny place to start, especially from someone who runs a payments company. You'd think maybe we'd be better at messaging or branding at this point. But imagine when we were starting Stripe, it was actually really hard, say when you're raising money for the company, one of the biggest obstacles we faced was people thinking, this is just a solved problem. Aren't there already ways to accept money on the internet? It's the year 2009. I'm pretty sure we got this thing figured out. And having to kind of repeatedly explain to people, no, this is actually still unsolved, but that took some effort. That's the first place to start is if you contrast how mature the internet is, essentially as an information exchange network where we have a majority of people in the world now with some”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world, and then we'll do the tough work to standardize that and not expose it to our customers. And so I think in a way it's been valuable that we haven't provided too much on acquisitions for international expansion. I think if you're going to have an acquisitive business, certainly in technology, you need to have a plan for integrating them well.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can then augment that platform breadth with acquisition. So I think it's probably a bit of a stage of life thing. The other thing that's maybe relevant here is, again, what we've been building, I actually think it's been helpful that up to now we haven't grown it with acquisitions. This is a little bit getting into the kind of payments industry wonkishness. But the previous generation of companies that people had to use to accept online payments were often assembled through strings of acquisitions. mobile platform that people would be using was actually kind of seven different platforms nit together by various acquisitions what that meant was that van customers it was incredibly painful if they were going to expand to region they would have to change the integration they would have to even more engineering work to do that i think again part of what's health strike get to this stage is the fact that we made a decision very early on that we were going to start from the ideal api and work backwards and so products api wants to be able to accept money from people all around”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're running a business, being able to get it to the point where you can run it by acquisitions, not being in that kind of business myself, it seems like a very pleasant way to run a business because you have this fairly easy way that you can take capital and turn it into incremental growth for the business. I can imagine Stripe will get more acquisitive later on in its development. I think as we look at where Stripe is and what we need to do on the product side, honestly, there's just lots of really low-hanging fruit that we kind of have to do ourselves internally. And so as we think about expanding stripe internationally or making it even easier to get up and running with Stripe. That's one of the core ways that we have always differentiated the product since we got started is we want you to come along and in five minutes set up a business by signing up for Stripe. If we want to make that three minutes, that's not something we can really acquire a business to do. Whereas those companies get more mature, it tends to be about platform breadth.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think those are some of the natural phenomena to talk about. I think venture capital feels like it must have something to do with it, both the fact that, as you say, valuations of technology companies tend to be fairly healthy and the strategy in a way.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vast number of independent businesses, and so one will sell like software to golf clubs and the other will sell plumbing software. And the managers will trade notes, things like that. But other than that, they're run more or less completely why it's not the case that we don't have this in technology. I mean, I'm curious, do you have any theories?”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Service clouds, they'll make one of these acquisitions and they'll very tightly integrate it with the rest of Salesforce. And then maybe on the other end of the spectrum, you can kind of think of venture capital as the much more loose version of this where they're actually not part of the same company at all, but maybe there's kind of common elements and how they're done. But no one really has within technology done what you actually see pretty commonly in the rest of the world, which is one holding company for a whole bunch of independent businesses that are sharing expertise, they're sharing management styles, they're maybe rotating managers across them. There's one counterexample which we probably both know, constellation software, which at this stage owns, do you know how many independent business they have? It's like 500 businesses.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has come through selective acquisitions made at good prices. What's interesting is that then they often give the managers of the acquired companies still a lot of latitude in how they operate and how the companies work. And so it's not the case that they're really deeply tightly integrating them to the one platform. They're not kind of slurping up all the employees and making them work in a whole new way. They actually kind of buy these companies and then don't integrate them that tightly, but are still driven really interesting performance as a result of that. And it's interesting because in tech, it feels like we only really have one of two modes. One mode is there are certainly companies that have done acquisitions really, really well. I mean, Salesforce is probably one of the or Cisco maybe. Those are two of the most prominent examples where they've made acquisition after acquisition. Salesforce will acquire a company. They acquire desk.com and turn it into...”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that sounds incredibly obvious to say, but sometimes you have to remind people in Silicon Valley that this is the case. And the way they tend to do that is somewhat different to what happens in technology. And in particular, you get a lot of these, if you look at single industry conglomerates, the classic conglomerates are maybe the Berkshire Hathaways, very famous for just having so many different intellectual hobbies of Warren Buffett under one corporate structure. RJR Navisco is probably the classic multi-industry conglomerate. It's like, what is a cigarette manufacturer and literally a cookie unique of Oreos doing under one corporation? But if you just look for a second at kind of the single industry conglomerates, like some of the ones I mentioned like LVM Agent Beauty or Transdime or something like that, it's actually pretty interesting. Vale Resorts might be another one actually that owns many of the ski properties in Vale and Heavenly and places like that. It's really interesting how they work, which is firstly you have, they're very aggressive acquirers, a lot of their growth.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Topic. But I find interesting to look at is how it tends to be different outside of technology and the different dynamics you get in conglomerates and kind of enduring businesses in other industries because we're kind of used to the particular way in which technology likes to do it. You talk to investors and they'll often be following successful companies like Transdime in Aerospace or Danaher, the industrial conglomerate, LVMH in the luxury business they own Louis Vuitton and the Champagne brand and things like that. What I have found interesting in looking at these, first off, as you probably know from these, there are tons of really spectacularly successful companies that have grown at high rates for years and years and years outside of technology. Pizza is another one that people like to talk about because it's actually grown more impressively than all the technology companies.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, that's an interesting place to start. Well, I think look, most of the technologists I know are really interested in studying the history of technology because you want to not just be a one-hit wonder, you want to not just have one product that works and then passes by, but you want to be able to surf multiple waves. I think all the kind of people have been talking recently about how much of the S&P 500 is now made up of the Google's Facebooks, Microsoft companies like that. I think if you look at all those companies, what's impressive about them is how they've managed to surf multiple waves and have multiple successful independent lines of business. And so Facebook making the move to mobile successfully, integrating acquisition successfully, Microsoft, missing the jump to the internet and kind of browsers, but initially, but now having many, I think it's six or seven independent dollar revenue businesses. And so most of technologists I know are really interesting.”
2020-06-16 · Invest Like the Best · John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source