Brian O’Malley

But I would say in some ways the lines are blurring.

So if you take a really key trend right now, which is around longevity or people spending their own dollars to drive their own health, you could argue that's a much more core need and something that doesn't play off of the seven deadly sins.

But also health is the new wealth.

And so in some ways there's a vanity metric to be doing some of these things.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's always important when we look at these companies, take the education category, for example.

It's hard work getting a degree, teaching yourself a language.

And so we are ultimately playing against the seven deadly sins.

The companies need to be that much more effective with how they drive the product mechanics, with how they build a community together, because in those cases, you're you're running uphill.

But the most successful businesses, something like a Duolingo, they're able to accomplish that.

They're almost able to take this long-term feedback cycle and turn it into kind of short-term rewards, which is the gamification of these kind of more worthwhile pursuits than the seven deadly sins.

100%.

There's a view that Instagram, Facebook, all these companies were kind of part of this deterministic wave of, you know, somebody was going to create a photo sharing app.

Somebody was going to create a social network.

To what degree do you believe that's true?

I definitely believe that's true.

A lot of these companies started with some intrinsic need.

They were usually not the first ones to solve, but ultimately came up with the right solution at the right time.

And so if you think about Facebook, they were solving this natural human desire to connect.

And they were able to do so in a way that once you had cloud servers and once you had more internet connectivity was just possible online.