Andrew Marks

It can be a seemingly stalwart company that has immense consistency and whatever, but those can be disrupted.

Yeah, that's of course true.

But I think the other thing that's really interesting to note, and there are these very widely circulated charts of the speeding up of technological adoption.

And so it was very possible for companies to be much more durable back then than it is today, in my opinion.

I mean, if you transport yourself back to 1950 and you think about, well, how many businesses are there where I think I can say with high conviction that they'll be the same in 10 years as they are today.

I think that number would probably be much, much higher than you could say today without understanding what management is doing to further entrench their moats or fend off competition or continuously evolve or whatever.

It's very, very hard to say, well, with no minding of the ship, this business will just stay consistent.

There are very few businesses that idiots can run these days.

Well...

Like everything, it's a double-edged sword.

I mean, on the one hand, you just made the point that without minding the ship, companies are much more potentially disruptable.

But on the other hand, that means if you have competitive advantages and you continue to mind those advantages and you use them to enter adjacent markets or launch new products or going after other markets geographically or whatever, there's much more value creation to be had.

And I think the ability to leverage your advantages and build more for the companies that are really doing so has probably never been higher.

And by the way, with the internet, you can address global markets.

We just talked about newspapers where you couldn't address the town next door.

One of my favorite writings on investing, it's not actually about investing, but it's this guy, Brian Arthur.

And he wrote something called Increasing Returns in the New World of Business.

And that was in the mid-90s.

And he made the observation that

with the new world with the new distribution models of things like the internet and whatever the best companies could continue to get bigger and bigger whereas you were sort of capped out more in the old world and so you would have diminishing returns to scale over time and by the way that couldn't have been more right you look at markets over the subsequent couple decades