Hamilton Helmer

So I mentioned this sort of ethereal concept before, business definition.

So it's rather important.

So if you think about Uber versus Netflix, where they go next, right?

Uber at first, their thought was this was an international business.

That means that going into China, somehow their strength would be transferable into that effort and they could be successful.

And Netflix thinking about going international, thinking that if they started streaming in Korea, that that would make a lot of sense.

So that's the question.

The key thing there is if you have an established business, is the drivers of power in that extensible to that additional segment you're considering, whether it's geographic or customer or whatever?

And because if it is,

The risk reward of doing it, the calculation beginning, is so much better, because being able to carve out value to yourself is really hard.

And if you can build onto something that already does that and it works in that environment, then oh boy, go there, because that's so much easier than doing something really new.

And so Netflix streaming in Korea, it built on, so you're saying you can share content across countries, right?

It built in the same fixed cost economics of content development and worked.

Ubers, if they have a source of power, it has to do with geographical density in a specific area like the Bay Area or something.

Right.

Exactly.

And if it turned out that the engineering part was 75% of the cost structure, I mean, content for Netflix is 75%, then it would have been fine.

But it's not, just as you said.

And so when you're thinking about business definition, in some businesses, international is part of the same business, which is to say it's under the same power umbrella.

And in some businesses, it's not.