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So, the question was early days,
business strategy, competitive landscape.
So, in the early days, we actually did put together a business plan.
I can remember pitching the business plan to our first investors.
We were at the partner meeting at a venture capital firm,
Menlo Park, Bessemer, and we said mobile's changed because nobody
made money on mobile before '08.
There had been a bunch of investments and people that had built
on Brew or the latest device from Nokia, what have you;
nobody had made any money. So, the rules have changed.
Number one, we don't have to spend all of our R&D dollars porting
because Nokia is like 150 different handsets a year;
on iPhone that was one or two but the same operating system.
Number two, everybody has data now.
It used to be the carriers would put tariffs around data access
and only a subset of the devices would have access to data.
That has changed. Number three, the distribution has changed.
We no longer have to go through the carriers for the distribution.
The carriers don't understand distribution anyway, Apple did.
And, then number four, the devices are actually pretty interesting.
There is GPS on them. There is accelerometers on them.
There is OpenGL, real-time graphic display, the rest.
And, because of these four factors,
it actually - we could actually build a business around mobile,
and our strategy was to think about building a network and
then monetizing some of the content across the network,
which is more or less what we're doing.
So, truth be told, we do have those slides and those
slides still hold from four and a half years ago when
we pitched to the investors - or four years ago.
But, here's perhaps one of the interesting aspects of that story.
So, we pitched this to this reputable firm that has about
$10 billion under management and the lead partner on mobile,
who had done all their mobile investments, raised his hand and said
"this is ludicrous. Apple, the platform you're betting on,
will sell as many devices in a year as Nokia will sell in one week,
and in India, Nokia means phone."
And, we said, "Okay, yeah, good point,
but remember what we said about the rules changing?
That's why we're making the bet on this platform and that's why
we're going to have velocity behind our R&D because we're just
going to focus on this one platform initially."
Anyway, they wrote the check and they made the investment,
perhaps off of that business plan,
but I don't think that anybody believed
in the business plan at the time. I think it was just a gamble.
And, credit to David Cowan for taking that risk.