Absolutely. When choosing between network effects vs. data, I will invest in a data company every time. Data seems to pay off in totally unforeseeable ways far into the future.
Take, for example, YouTube. Google paid $1.65bn for a company that didn't have a way to make money, but it generates massive amounts of human-labelled data. Now, a decade later, with Google's distributed artificial neural net, YouTube is granting Google sight. Google can see.
Yes, this is proof by anecdote - makes me cringe too. But bet on data. You can make lots of money.
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Absolutely. When choosing between network effects vs. data, I will invest in a data company every time. Data seems to pay off in totally unforeseeable ways far into the future.
Take, for example, YouTube. Google paid $1.65bn for a company that didn't have a way to make money, but it generates massive amounts of human-labelled data. Now, a decade later, with Google's distributed artificial neural net, YouTube is granting Google sight. Google can see.
Yes, this is proof by anecdote - makes me cringe too. But bet on data. You can make lots of money.
In the case of LinkedIn, the company is both a network effect & data company.