Charlie Songhurst

This is a problem, say, with space tech as an area of innovation.

Every single person involved with space is basically a brilliant genius who's passionate about their work and loves it.

And so very, very strong dynamic.

On the other hand, if you hang out in audit software, accounting software,

You're sitting in an area that's complex, but no one wants to boast they do it at a dinner party.

And what you might call the sort of spiritual rewards of the industry are lower.

And therefore, you just get less by entrepreneurs.

Therefore, the chance of every entrepreneur succeeding is significantly higher.

No, I think it would more work in the sort of case of Salesforce, Workday Tableau, Datadog, all those classic enterprise SaaS names.

I think the truly exceptional ones are so idiosyncratic, there's no way to find them.

Because if they were predictable, you would get so much competition, they wouldn't exist.

Interesting when you look, say, at Google, how many failed search companies preceded them?

Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves.

Imagine that someone sent you something about Google when it was a small company.

You'd say, oh, it's just another search engine.

In some ways, you almost need the opposite.

You need a case for why it was so unobvious.

If you look at early Facebook, there's all these comments on, but surely MySpace has only won this market.

I think the exceptions are just so exceptional, you can't formulate rules for them.

I think it's the next tier down where there's probably more repeatable behavior.