Benn Stancil on benn.substack

1) For sure, and as I said in the second footnote, I think tooling conversations are actually pretty useful, both in and of themselves, and as a means to talk about other things. It's not the end all be all, but they play a very important part in moving things forward. 2) So I made this point too clumsily - I agree with this actually. My intended point wasn't that data was useful at these companies because of their scale; it was that data was helpful because data could dramatically improve how they solved the business problem they needed to solve. That's more about the structure of the business than scale (though eventually, obviously, scale certainly helps). My question then is, how many businesses actually have that characteristic? I'd argue a gas station does not (it might at huge scale, though everything does at huge scale). 3) Yes, though I think the danger now is the opposite: People read hype about data and believe there's a there there when there's not actually much there. 4) For sure, but at some point that feels like a cheat. If our tools for extracting energy from peat got good enough, would peat be a good energy source? Yeah. But you can say that about anything. If our science fair potato batteries were efficient enough, potatoes would be a good energy source. The question to me is it worth it now, with things being as efficient as they are today? 5) It blows my mind. 6) On one hand, yes. There were tons of other efforts to do things like what they did, and they failed. If we just looked at the lottery winners, we'd think they picked their numbers with unbelievable skill. If we look at everyone who bought a ticket, it's obvious they got lucky. (That's an extreme case, and there's there's plenty of skill in growing those businesses; I just mean that luck is certainly a big part of it too.) On the other hand, even if their success is all skill, that doesn't mean data was necessarily a big part of it. Zuck could just be a prophet with incredible product vision (ok, now that I say that, maybe it was data).