Brian O’Malley

Consumer is a little bit different in that you need to look at the alternative that people already have available to them.

I think about a company like Uber, and when they got launched, it was both this really magical experience

that they were able to offer where you pushed a button and then that kicked off these set of chain reaction events behind the scenes in order for a car to ultimately show up.

But Uber would have not remotely been successful if they started out in New York where the yellow cab system was pretty darn good.

You need to remember what the taxi system was like in San Francisco.

You would call, you would sit on hold for maybe 20, 30 minutes.

They would send a car and then 50% of the time that car would pick someone else along the way and never show up.

And so I look at the delta between what is available today and what can this new company offer as being important, as opposed to just looking at it in a vacuum where you're solely looking at that new solution.

Facebook, same, famously started in Harvard.

If it had just started as a generalist software, if it did a generalist social network, or if it hadn't used real names.

You know, we imagine these companies as they are today, but we forget that they were at some point kind of these two year old companies.

And if that, you know, taken on a 10 year old competitor, a 10 year old market, they may have never lived to kind of be these these large conglomerates.

People forget about, I would say, two things related to Facebook.

The first of which is that, yes, they were live originally at Harvard.

But so many students at Harvard had friends at these other universities that they wanted to connect with.

And so when they launched the other Ivy League schools, they would get to over 90 percent penetration within those schools within a couple of weeks.

And that was largely because the pent up demand, because the friend networks weren't local just to the college you went to.

You had high school friends that were now at all of these different schools.

And they were very deliberate about how they expanded from one university to the next.

People also forget that for a long time, you needed a .edu email address to even access the site.