Charlie Songhurst

So each time you get a new customer, you improve the product for all the existing customers.

because you get a bigger data set to work on.

Strangely, I think spotting them has less use than spotting the fallacies.

If we go to data, there's an amazing sort of the last gasp of a company whose unit in economics don't work is the values in the data.

And 99% of the times that isn't true.

And the idea is that you've got a unique data set that's going to be incredibly valuable, maybe for advertisers, maybe for other customers, maybe for enterprises, because of the insights to be generated.

But it actually turns out most data sets will get you the same insight on people.

There was once a company, I don't know if it's true from those principles, but they said if you gave the last five browsing sites that someone had been to or their last five latitude, longitude locations in real space,

or their last five Google search terms, or their last five credit card purchases, you could basically get the same level of accuracy on that person's predicted behavior, which means there's a sort of false mirage of an oasis, which is there's going to be value in the data.

And it turns out to be a mirage because there's so many other ways to get to that answer.

And so half the time, what you're looking for is sort of the exact opposite.

It's where it appears there should be value capture, but there won't be.

I'll go for, if you pick two axes, one axis is boredom and the other is complexity.

You want highly boring and highly complex because everything in the universe is a supply and demand curve.

And you just get insufficient supply of entrepreneurs in the highly boring but highly complex space.

And therefore you get elevated returns.

So if you go through the quadrants, you've sort of got the whole simple side, boring and simple and complex and simple.

It's just too hard to get differentiation without enough complexity.

That's when you get commoditization.

If you go for interesting and complex, you get brilliant entrepreneurs.