But, I do believe, number one,
so the business model is what delivers value to the customer.
>> If you look at the industrial age and
the default business model, people think of as you construct something,
you have some cost associated with constructing it, and you charge something
a little bit more than what your cost is and that's your margin.
That's kind of the standard business model.
When you look at businesses that are being created today,
the ones that have exploded, they've dramatically moved away from that model.
If you look at Google, which a lot of people didn't even understand how they
were making their money when they first came out, and it boggled a lot of people's
minds on how they could deliver such a valuable service and not charge for it.
And it was only after they went public that people realized that the Google
business model was, essentially, we're going to deliver this service,
we're going to create value, and then we're going to take this value that we
created while delivering value, and we're going to resell that to someone else.
So that was, I would say, a serious significant innovation
in business models that a lot of people are following the path of today.
You look at the new things are available today, there's going to be all new very
different types of business models that continue to get innovated on.
And so I do believe that has a big
fundamental structural difference to how you set up your business.
>> As I've gotten a little bit older and
with more experience, I have a much healthier appreciation for timing.
There are certain businesses that work well at a certain point in time
that you just couldn't start at a different point in time.
Avant is an interesting example of one, where we started three years ago and
that timing actually happened to be really great in retrospect because
there was investor interest.
And with a company that needs a tremendous amount of capital to start,
investor interest is critical.
There was consumer interest because consumers understand online.
They've gotten fond of using services like Uber and
Lyft, Instacart, Amazon for all their various transactional needs.
But in banking it has an app.
The financial services didn't happen so you have consumers really shift their
behavior and now you have the ability to build these businesses.
And my prior business, which was a real estate company, I think was the same way.
The fact that there was financial distress created an opening for us to start our
business because it's really hard to enter as a start up but once you're in,
then I think you could evolve and really build on top of that base.