Hamilton Helmer

The second is that it's hard to get right.

It's a difficult area.

There are reasons that have to do with motivation and there are reasons that have to do with understanding.

And Chen Yi will talk about some of the common business nostrums that sort of fall apart in this.

On the motivation side, I'll just mention that from a founder point of view, they just founded something that works, and so they're accustomed to that success.

And so sometimes they may not appreciate all the idiosyncratic, uncontrolled elements that went into that success.

And they're very creative and they want to just move forward.

And so they're inclined to do that.

And that's a great motive force.

I love that.

That's the lifeblood of an economy.

But it also means that you can sometimes get into stuff that you really don't know how to do it.

Right.

And then on the people that often sit on their boards or finance them, there's also a dissonance, which is that if you think of the VC community, the business model and VCs issue find really interesting things to invest in.

And then hopefully they go up in value.

And then there's an exit, which you profit from that increase in value, which is this wonderful engine.

If you think about what drives the US economy, it's just phenomenal.

But in the early stages of how people think about value,

there isn't yet this track record of persistence because people are often, for example, spending a lot to acquire customers.

And so profitability may not be evident yet.