Charlie Songhurst

But I think even when you're talking to a company at seed, you can sort of start to have that conversation over how big a problem are you solving?

How many people are you solving that for?

Or how much money have those institutions got to spend in your product if it's in the enterprise?

And then if that's the utility created, that's part one.

How big is that?

And then two is, what are the competitive dynamics in this marketplace?

So how much of that utility will you capture?

And how much will just be given to your customers as consumer surplus?

And one of the sort of interesting, wonderful tragedies of the economy over the last four years is there are so many companies where 110% of the economic energy passed over to consumer surplus.

So you just had massive increases in living standards, sort of accidental Wikipedias.

So there's very strange examples like LCD televisions.

Everyone switched from cathode tube to LCD in the early 2000s.

That's an increase in human utility, but no TV companies made money because the market was too competitive.

Same with things like improvements in consumer modems, routers, switches.

You don't see 200 billion market cap router companies like Intel, but we all benefit from far faster speeds than we did 20 years ago.

And so what you're looking for as an investor is high utilitarian outcome and the ability to capture it.

Most extreme is obviously network effects.

Obviously, you have to get these in marketplaces.

You get them in anything with the classics, Metcalfe law.

You get some examples where, going to a company area today, you combine data from other companies to generate insight.