Cloud communications, also known as Communications Platform as a Service (or CPaaS) allows businesses to communicate with their customers using channels such as voice, email, SMS, and instant messaging.
This week we sit down with industry expert, Paul Ruppert, to discuss his insights on this complex market, and hear a few anecdotes from his 20-year career in C-level roles with leading global CPaaS providers including Syniverse, mBlox (Sinch), Infobip, SAP, and Route Mobile.
We also discuss Twilio’s recent acquisitions of Segment and Zipwhip, and how these are helping Twilio build out its impressive omnichannel communications capability.
If you’re a leader of an innovative technology company looking for insight on expanding internationally or looking to move to the next level by scaling up, Paul is available for a no-obligation conversation at pruppert@gpvltd.com or via www.globalpointview.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the Telescope Investing podcast at Spotify, or on your podcast platform of choice
Transcript
Albert: Hi, this is Albert.
Luke: And this is Luke.
Albert: Today is Monday the 16th of August.
Luke: Welcome to the Telescope Investing podcast.
Intro
Luke: Now, Albert, before you get started, I’ve got a bone to pick with you. If our listeners listen to last week’s anniversary episode and the quiz, I am very sceptical about the final result.
Albert: I guess you’re talking about the fact that I won quite convincingly. What’s your problem, Luke?
Luke: Very convincingly, maybe a bit too convincingly. As I was doing the editing and listening to the episode, some of your answers were suspiciously close.
Albert: Are you accusing me of cheating, Luke?
Luke: I will buy you that dinner, but I hope it doesn’t taste like ashes in your mouth.
Albert: I assure you, Luke, that I wasn’t cheating. Well, let’s get on with this week’s episode.
Luke: Go on, tee us up, Albert. What are we talking about today?
Albert: Well, one of the stocks in our model portfolio this year is Twilio, a leading provider of cloud communication services, and we did a deep dive into this company back in April. Cloud communications, which is also known as communications-platform-as-a-service or CPaaS, is the infrastructure that allows businesses to communicate with their customers using a variety of channels, such as voice, email, and instant messaging.
Luke: Most of our research on CPaaS so far has been oriented to Twilio. You and I have both got stock in Twilio, and it’s also a key component of our model portfolio, but there are a ton of players in the CPaaS market. So today, we’re delighted to welcome the special guest to the show who’s had senior executive roles in many of these companies in the cloud communication space. Welcome, Paul Ruppert. Hi, Paul.
Albert: Hi, Paul.
Paul: Good morning, Luke. Good morning, Albert. I feel like maybe I might be turning into a marriage counsellor at the beginning of all this, but I’m glad we could go on to neutral ground as opposed to the outcome of quizzes.
Luke: There’s a dinner riding on the outcome, Paul. It’s critical stuff.
Albert: And hopefully, this episode won’t end with a divorce.
Paul: Indeed. Well, it’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for the invitation.
About Paul
Albert: Well, let’s get started, Paul. Why don’t you start off by telling us a bit about yourself and how you got into the CPaaS space?
Paul: Sure, and again, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation to talk about CPaaS. Personally, I have over 20 years experience in the telecommunications media and technology space. From the perspective, as you said, Luke, of senior executive and C-level roles. Starting off with mobile network operators, messaging service vendors, and messaging purchasing enterprises. My functional experience spans product development, sales management, global growth scaling, corporate development, M&A, and post-merger integration strategies and deals spanning 6 million to 66 billion dollars.
Specific to our topic today of the CPaaS segment and Twilio, Syniverse, and other CPaaS-related companies, I’ve been involved in the arc of services, which now culminates as a CPaaS play, which is really a term of art that’s just recently been invented. But specifically, in my case, I started off as an international roaming director and then moving into network interoperability as it was called, then moving on to person-to-person messaging often referred to as P2P messaging. Which has then evolved into application-to-person messaging also known as A2P or otherwise characterized as enterprise-focused messaging. And then later on in the evolution of the space to enterprise messaging aggregators, which are the companies that pull all of this together, which we’re going to be talking about. And now is the full monty quote communications-platform-as-a-service.
CPaaS
Luke: One of our subscribers is my mum and so I like to always try and make our technology chats relatable to her.
Paul: Sure, exactly.
Luke: This is really about computers messaging people. This is how companies engage with their customers.
Paul: That’s correct. Application to person. You just nailed it on the head. The best way for your mum to look at it is, I know that you’ve been travelling around in the past year, Luke, but if she were to go off and visit you and she had a delay on one of her flights out of London, she would have gotten a notification that the flight had been changed, delayed, or rescheduled. So that’s the type of messaging that we’re talking about.
Albert: So, we mentioned earlier that Twilio is not the only player in this market. Who would you say are the biggest players?
Paul: There was a time when I was involved in this business and there was just a handful of these players in the messaging space, even on a global basis. But now, I track over 250 CPaaS providers globally.
Luke: Wow.
Paul: They vary in size from about $100 million to about $1 billion in revenues per year. To your question, the most significant players in the space: Twilio, obviously, which you’ve already mentioned, Vonage, Sinch, 8X8, Route Mobile, Tanla, Zenvia, Kaleyra, Bandwidth, CM.com, IMI Mobile, which recently was acquired by Cisco, and LINK Mobility. And those are probably the biggest publicly traded.
And then there are private operators, obviously: MessageBird is one, another one is called Infobip, Syniverse that I’ve mentioned, which has been around as a company for over 40 years, TeleSign, and Plivo. And the asterisks in terms of the list would include MessageBird and Infobip, which are rumoured to be on an IPO track for 2022, and Syniverse, which is now rumoured to be looking to do a SPAC perhaps this year.
Luke: Certainly a hot sector with many of those companies being relatively new entrants, I guess. I recognize a few of the names, but certainly not all familiar.
Paul: Yep, the evolution of the development of the segment started off in the early 2000s. I was in a company [that] was one of the pioneering players in this space, Mobile 365. We started the company in 2001. I came in as employee number 12 and my remit at the time was to take a blank page and create international sales for the company because I asserted that the company had to go global from the start. Having come from a mobile network operator background, I’d spent four years in what is now AT&T, I knew that this type of telecommunication offering had to be a globalized solution, which would give us an advantage and have a higher valuation down the road. And I guessed right in the context of that experience.
Total addressable market
Albert: Yeah, I had no idea that there are over 200 CPaaS providers. That number really shocked me. So how big is the CPaaS market in terms of revenue?
Paul: So, the reality of this space is that it is still evolving and quite nascent. The reality of the spaces we’re talking about how enterprises best choose to communicate with their consumers and the preferences of how consumers want to communicate with enterprises for whatever reason.
And that for whatever reason is really the wild card here because the application developers can come up with various types of ideas as to how to reach out to customers or how customers may want to reach out to them. A great example of that is in 2008, after leaving Mobile 365, I happened to be talking to an executive at a conference in Paris and I was on a panel as was he and we were talking about the opportunity of, the developing opportunity of, enterprise messaging. This was some time ago, keep in mind. This was the developing stages of it. And he was quite enchanted and quite animated about how his company could engage in it. And it was a fledgling firm that some people had heard about.
I had spent four years in Silicon Valley working out of the Bay Area, and this was one of those companies that a few friends of mine who were still there and I had left were telling me about. And so he was very interested in how I might be able to help them engage their customers, their growing customers. That executive was an executive inside Facebook and Facebook became my first enterprise client as a consultant. And what they were looking for was trying to figure out how to be able to engage their social media customers in a different way than just going online, and they recognized that SMS would be a way of doing it.
So we put together a project looking at the SMS opportunity and upside globally. Now that was again, in 2008, they came up with an idea and then they evolved that idea to utilize SMS as a security function. That security function is now called two-factor authentication or one-time password, which we all use. And the one-time password aspect of the overall revenues of CPaaS and messaging aggregators is massive, just massive. And so to come up with a specific number is a little tough, but I will say that I was reading a report from Arthur D. Little that over the next few years, the growth is roughly about an $18 billion market as of 2019, and by 2024, that will expand to a $61 billion market, which is a CAGR of 27.6%.
Now let me go one step further in the analysis. There is another company that I utilize frequently. I know the founder very well and have I worked with them on a number of projects. And that’s a guy named Nick Lane from Mobilesquared, which is an analyst company out of the UK. So his estimates said only 3% of the world’s businesses use A2P messaging. In A2P messaging, enterprise-related messaging is kind of the gateway drug to becoming a CPaaS provider. So if we’re only talking about 3% of the world’s businesses are utilizing enterprise messaging, there’s a huge, huge upside here.
And then the last capstone on that question. It was a simple question, Albert, but forgive me for going deeper and deeper and deeper. We are now seeing adjacent opportunities relative to artificial intelligence and machine learning engagements. And that would be via a CPaaS platform as well as if you think about it. What is customer experience? Well, customer experience is driven by your experience dealing with enterprises, which translates into customer care, and the customer care business is highly competitive.
And if you ever look at the turnover rates of call centres, it’s about 100% in 90 days because it’s not a very easy job. There are studies now in the use of web chat initially, and now utilizing text messaging where you can asynchronously, which means to your choice, you can inquire about various types of issues you might have with a service, and you can do it via text. You could do it at three o’clock in the morning, or you could do it at three o’clock in the afternoon. And that can be resolved by the enterprise in a much more efficient manner. The reality of call centres now is those companies that utilize various types of text messaging as a means or CPaaS solutions as a means to engage customers, their turnover rate has dropped dramatically as a result of that.
Luke: Yeah, I can imagine it’s a pretty horrible job as a call centre operative. The first contact with a customer is they’ve been on hold for like 30 minutes and so they’re irate and frustrated before they even speak to you. It’s much better for the company and for the individual to engage the customer on their messaging product of choice,
Paul: Precisely. And that’s not even being put on hold to be transferred to someone else.
Luke: It might be a bit of a sidebar, but one thing that does fascinate me is how SMS still seems to be so core and still growing. I don’t know if I’ve got the wrong end of this, but it’s an inherently relatively insecure method of communication. Whenever I have like 2FA capabilities on platforms I use, I try and use an authenticator app rather than getting a text message, because you see so many things in the news about not little guys like me, but relatively high-profile people having their numbers cloned and then suddenly that becomes a really germane attack vector, cloning their phone.
Paul: Well, that is the weakest link in the chain is individual behaviour. But for some nefarious entity trying to get access to these messages, there are only two entities that actually quote, can read a message and that is the mobile network operator themselves because it’s running over their infrastructure or this interconnect provider. And the interconnect provider, otherwise known as the CPaaS provider in messaging, sits between the operators, which is exactly the rationale as to why they’re effective because they can be neutral buffers between the two operators in managing this so much better than the operators themselves.
Luke: As you say, the human is the weak link there and sometimes that weak link is actually the human that works for the mobile phone operator. They think they are reissuing a SIM card that they’re not issuing the SIMs to the person they thought they were. Things like that.
Paul: Yeah. Oddly enough, I sat on the fraud desk as part of my training when I first came into a mobile network operator, and we had former retired FBI agents who were walking us through the system to be able to get an understanding of that, but yes, that’s the weakest link. The notion that you can pull out a message from the trillions, teens have trillions of messages that are transmitted on an annual basis is just fantasy. Nobody’s got that kind of computing.
Twilio
Albert: In one of our earlier chats, you described Twilio as a black hole, as it sucks up everything around it. And I saw in their recent earnings that Twilio purchased a portion of Syniverse. Do you know how Syniverse fits in with Twilio’s business?
Paul: I know it intimately because, at one point in my career, I was running the messaging business inside Syniverse, which at that point was about $140 million revenue stream, and they were a customer of mine. I had the opportunity and the privilege to meet Jeff Lawson on a couple of occasions and learn about his vision, his viewpoint, and this was before Twilio became Twilio that everybody takes notice of. As I mentioned earlier, the idea of Twilio was Jeff’s notion that the application developers were not being fully served and could take greater advantage of the capabilities of text messaging.
He came at it, not from the transport layer side, which is my heritage, my foundation, and instead, he came from it from the application side. What creative capabilities can we offer? And by the way, these other pieces of being able to send text messaging, all well and good, but that’s really a commoditized solution.
If you think about it, there’s a direct correlation between how Federal Express, FedEx, and Amazon operate. They’re not concerned about the roads and they just have the means to be able to move messages, meaning, move packages around, which they didn’t initially. So they had others providing that capability. So I was in one of those companies that was providing that capability. Directly to your question, they need companies like Syniverse or Infobip or Vonage or Bandwidth, or any of these others to be able to move that type of application that is utilizing messaging.
Now, along the way, they’ve gotten larger and larger and larger for a whole host of reasons. Some cultural in the context of this was a company that was developed in the Bay Area. That was Silicon Valley based venture capital initiative. People that I used to know out there would call it they’re the most recent girl with the curl. And that became the rocket ride of how successful they were. He always talked about the application layer economy and to his credit and to his genius, he tapped into that and was able to build upon it.
Now, the other thing, yeah, this is just a personal experience with him. I remember it was a Thursday night and their offices in San Francisco at the time, and he asked me to stay for dinner, which was a group dinner, everybody in the office. This was a routine that they did. And the new hires who had just finished the development of their own app, they had to present it to everyone in the office, and this was part of the culture. And I was like, this is very interesting in terms of being able to create that cultural connection. But most importantly, the thing that stood out to me was, wait a minute, you are taking advantage of all of your customer’s applications, so you see all of this and at the same time, you are also developing your own applications to be applied in the text messaging space. So you see it at both ends, both worlds, and you’re able to combine that.
You learn from your customers and what they’re doing, something creative, and that application being applied in a specific commercial instance. And at the same time, you’re able to let’s say replicate it in a different context. That was the mind-blowing aha phenomenon, you know, the epiphany of man, this guy’s genius! Being in a space where I try to take a perspective of looking out for innovation and try to look for an over-the-horizon opportunity, and that really struck a chord with me. And that’s why now, whenever I talk to guys like yourself, in the financials world, meaning investors or bankers, you know, the whole list of guys who are watching these types of stocks. That’s always the first thing when you start talking about CPaaS.
I don’t consider Twilio as being the leading CPaaS provider because where I started, from my perspective in this space, they’re not pure CPaaS providers. Roughly 70% of their traffic is run by Syniverse. To close the loop on your answer, that’s why Syniverse is still very important to them and is one of the reasons why they made that investment. At least that’s the street perspective, or let’s say the perspective of the rumour mill amongst the colleagues that I’ve had in the past.
Luke: And it’s really interesting to talk to somebody who’s had close contact with some of these great founder-leaders who’ve set the direction is in the industry for the last decade or two.
Paul: Yeah, it’s just one of those privileges of right timing. And my account executive was responsible for this. She told me all about it and I was like, sure, let’s go out and visit them.
Segment acquisition
Albert: And another acquisition that Twilio made last year was Segment, which brought them into the market for customer data. How important is the acquisition of Segment to Twilio’s growth opportunities?
Paul: Yeah, I think this was a very clever, smart move by them because what Segment does is gives them a means to fulfil something that has been unrequited, untapped in the CPaaS space. So when we’re talking about these alerts and notifications that I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of them are not personalized. So it’s not, Paul, your flight relative to X, Y, and Z, or there has been a potential violation of security, or whatever it might be. And so what Segment allows is to be able to take that data, process it on the backend so that it’s more personalized on the front end.
If you think about CPaaS and these companies that we’ve been talking about, they’re the ones who are on the front end relative to orchestrating all the integration of the pieces. And the pieces specifically include SMS, which we’ve been talking about, and most of these providers started off on this transport layer, this SMS layer; voice – voice is quite commoditized; but now we’ve got the emergence of video, primarily as a result of the pandemic, that acceleration of adoption. And then you have OTT, which stands for over the top, and that’s the likes of WhatsApp, which many of your listeners probably use, or Viber or Facebook or in other parts of the world, WeChat (you’re probably familiar with that, Albert), Snapchat, Kakao, Line, whatever it might be. And the idea of a CPaaS in the broader sense is a platform that is able to integrate all of these pieces.
So let’s go back to Segment. What does Segment do? Segment allows Twilio to have a much more individualized experience as well as to be able to mine all the data that it is able to process relative to group dynamics as well as individual behaviour. So that’s why I thought that was a great move.
Luke: I guess it’s great to have these aggregators of channels. So if you’re a company that wants to engage your customer, you can meet them on their platform of choice and you don’t have to build into everyone’s different API to do the same thing.
Paul: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Exactly, that is the case. This all comes down to personal interaction and behaviour in terms of messaging, that choice. Now, the key that we haven’t talked about is the hype aspects, which is where we are right now, as though all of this is now omnichannel-capable or unified-channel-capable or integrating all these various platforms, and that’s not the case yet.
Zipwhip acquisition
Luke: So you’ve taken us on the journey of a number of these players, Paul, and we talked about the acquisitive nature of Twitter. So we noticed they acquired a company called Zipwhip quite recently. How does that fit with their product offering?
Paul: You could characterize its investment thesis as a tuck-in technology, but I happened to know the CEO, John Lauer, for many years, and how he’s been able to build his company out. What Zipwhip does is essentially enable landline numbers, specifically 800 landline numbers, toll-free numbers, for text messaging capabilities. And I remember over drinks one night, he was telling me that somewhere around the average landline number that he was processing and enabling was sending over a hundred messages a day, and that was some years ago so I’m sure that number has escalated dramatically.
And so that aspect of the Twilio value proposition is one more element of how to be able to broaden that application functionality. So it’s not just traditional mobile numbers that are now enabled and controlled by Twilio, meaning the functionality. Now we have the 800 toll-free capabilities and then with the expansion of 800 numbers or toll-free numbers in different parts of the world, that’s another aspect of being able to globally scale this solution.
CPaaS trends
Albert: I think you’ve touched on this, Paul, about how the industry is moving to new channels such as WhatsApp and instant messaging. What are the key trends you are seeing in the whole space?
Paul: First off, if we were to have a conversation about this three years ago, I would be talking about how the business was very commoditized with margins eroding and continuing that trend, but something came along that transformed the industry. And when I say commoditized, we’re talking about 10 to 20% growth rates, depending on what region of the world or what country you might be in.
With the advent of COVID and the usage and the change of usage, I always refer this as curbside service. I’m old enough to remember what curbside service was as a child, which was a girl in a miniskirt rolling in on roller skates, bringing a hamburger to your car while you were lined up in their parking lot. Curbside service today, I bought some iPods recently and I pulled up to Best Buy, and I noticed there were eight messages that were exchanged as I was sitting there. And so the reality now is the growth rate for 2021 is estimated to be around 28% in terms of moving forward at that 25% rate for 2022, 2023, 2024.
Many times I’m asked, well, isn’t SMS dying? You know, and I have to say, well, I don’t know what economic unit is measured in teens of trillions on an annualized basis that just disappears. I mean, we’re not talking about buggy whips here. And I still trying to figure out what the projection is. Let’s say the erosion rate, at what point is considered disappear? 10% of current usage? Well, if that’s the case, that’s going to take a generation or maybe two generations, that kind of numbers.
And the other aspect is, as I mentioned earlier, this all comes down to convenience to the consumer. This is one of the things when you talk about. Well, mobile, essentially untethered our need to be plugged into the wall with a wireline telephone and everything exploded after that, including messaging.
And so I’m bullish on the space. I think this is going to continue to grow. People continue to use messaging in far more different circumstances, in different types of applications. So I think there’s considerable upside. I think in your terminology, my view is this is a megatrend in the telecommunication space, and you follow megatrends.
Albert: We definitely saw the acceleration of cloud communications during the pandemic, and I’ve been a happy shareholder of Twilio for about two or three years now, but even then the growth last year really shocked me. I believe the share price more than tripled in that time. It really shows the power that these communications platforms have during a time like the pandemic when people couldn’t go out and relied on communications services.
Paul: That’s correct.
Luke: And the same things happen in so many industries. It’s forced us to adopt certain efficiencies and now we’re coming out of the pandemic, hopefully, we don’t want to give those efficiencies up. They’ve made our lives dramatically better.
Paul: Exactly.
New entrants
Albert: And you mentioned earlier some of the smaller, newer companies coming up in the space, but which companies do you think are best positioned to capture market share from companies like Twilio, companies that we should keep an eye on?
Paul: Yeah, I would look at Infobip and MessageBird as probably the principal opportunities for someone like your listeners and yourselves. Both are being positioned for an IPO in the next, let’s say 18 months. So to keep your antenna out looking for them. The reality again, of the space is that back to North America, the growth opportunity in the US market, and the US market, it happens to be the largest volume of messages, the highest value as a market, and the fastest-growing. The estimate by Mobilesquared is around 60% growth rate in the next five years. So most of these could be good plays, but then it becomes a matter of just drilling into their customer base, their capabilities, how well they are integrating all these other pieces.
My caution in this space is that, not only the hype but what I would call CPosers as opposed to CPaaS. What do I mean by CPosers? Well, there are a lot of companies out there like SIP trunk providers, and these are voice providers. Well, they call themselves a CPaaS provider, but they only have one functionality, which is voice. Now I’m still trying to figure out how you can call yourself a CPaaS provider if you’ve only got one card in the deck, and they’re whole bunch of other cards you’re going to have to integrate before you get to the level of CPaaS, but these are terms of art. So that was the only caveat or caution that I would give to the investor classes, to do a little research, do a little digging.
Back to those that are publicly traded, I think SInch, that I’ve had a relationship with my past, is another one that certainly could be taking on the likes of Twilio as they move ahead. They have what I would call a last man standing strategy. They’re trying to acquire all of the conductivity they can globally, which means at the end of the day, they could be semi-monopoly status in the space, but they’ve done very well as well. And the other aspect, you didn’t mention it, but these companies are spread all around the world and they’re listed in various exchanges. Tanla and Route Mobile are both Indian operators, Indian aggregators, CPaaS providers that are looking to expand their reach out of Southeast Asia. They’re both listed on the national stock exchange of India. There’s another one CM.com. You’ve got others like Zenvia and Kaleyra, Vonage,, et cetera that have gone public in are listed on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, so they’re spread around.
Albert: With all these new players, Paul, I’m not sure whether to be worried or excited for Twilio’s prospects.
Paul: Well, they do have a massive first-mover advantage, don’t they? As I mentioned in our first conversation, they’re very much like a black hole. They create gravity in and of themselves.
Luke: They’re definitely true CPaaS, not CPoser. I like that term of yours. It’s almost becoming an investor red flag these days. Almost every company tries to add as-a-service onto the end of whatever they do.
Paul: That’s right.
Luke: That’s your new kind of dot-com boom.
Paul: Yeah, there’s another one, IPaaS, implementation-platform-as-a-service, which kind of sits in between a CPaaS provider as well as the enterprise. Like that’s a new one.
Luke: We’ve invested in a small company that does medical-scanning-as-a-service. I’m not sure how they get the as-a-service in there. They’re still deploying x-ray machines around the world but it’s as-a-service.
Paul: Okay. Ride the wave as you can.
Where to find Paul
Luke: Absolutely. Paul, today has been a really fascinating chat, and as I said earlier, great to connect with somebody who’s really worked inside of this industry and connected with so many of the thought leaders and actually built companies from the ground up. Fascinating to get your insights. Where would our listeners find out a little bit more about you if they wanted to have a direct conversation?
Paul: Well, it’s been a great conversation on my end and very much appreciate the invitation to share my knowledge, share my perspective on all of this. I guess if you’re a leader of an innovative technology company looking to what I would call, shed your skin and grow to the next level, or looking for strategic guidance on being able to expand outside of your region as well find opportunities to acquire. I’d welcome the chance to learn of your challenges and explore how I could help you, especially identify your next opportunities. So, I can be reached on my LinkedIn profile, which is Paul R Ruppert, or you can find me at my website, which is www.globalpointview.com, or you can email me directly at pruppert@gpvltd.com.
Luke: And we’ll drop all of that into the show notes.
Paul: Excellent.
Luke: You know, there’s a little anecdote, actually, I read about Jeff Lawson because he’s a fascinating chap, isn’t he? I wonder if I could just share this little extract that came to my eye the other day from one of my followers on Twitter, a chap called @LibertyRPF, and Liberty was quoting from Jeff’s book, Ask Your Developer. And it really goes back to how smart this guy was right, really, the very, very beginning of this career. I’ve not read the book myself, but I think this is going to prompt me to go grab a copy.
Jeff was talking about an internship he did very early in his career, and you might be familiar with this story. He says, “I needed to convert files from the old format to the new format, and my boss gave me my company-issued computer, descriptions of the old and new file formats, and showed me to my desk. I wrote a program in C that read in the old files and spit out the data in the new format. Around lunchtime, I returned to my manager’s desk to let him know I’d finished my first task. He was stunned. That apparently had been my job for the whole summer. He figured out spend days copy and pasting data from one file to another for thousands of files, and that would make for a great internship.”
Paul: Well, I’ve met Jeff and he was a fascinating guy without the context of he’s the CEO of this company. It was just a quick-growing startup at that stage, not even fledgling is what I would characterize, and in retrospect, he’s one of two billionaires I’ve been able to meet in course of my life so far.
Luke: Hopefully not the last.
Paul: Who knows.
Luke: Maybe you’ve got one on this call if Albert’s growth rate continues at the heady trajectory it’s on now!
Paul: Especially winning all these quizzes, you know, where we started off.
Albert: Yeah, that dinner is a start of riches to come.
Paul: Maybe you could arbitrage the dinner for some other value proposition.
Albert: Like that woman to arbitraged a pencil into a house after 30 trades.
Paul: Yeah, indeed
Quote
Luke: Well, Albert, do you want to close us out with a quote?
Albert: Sure. Let me close out the episode with a quote from another Paul, the American economist, Paul Samuelson. And he said, “Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”
Luke: Wise words.
Paul: Yes, quite wise.
Luke: I’ve got to say I find investing in the stock market quite exciting and quite interesting. It’s not quite like watching paint dry, studying our megatrends.
Albert: Yeah, I prefer it much more to any game in the casino.
Paul: Well, for excitement, I jump out of airplanes or shoot clays. That’s my form of excitement. Something a little bit more engaging in that moment, instead of long-term perspectives, that’s what you guys do.
Luke: We didn’t know that about you, Paul. That’s fascinating. Hopefully, you’re well-insured.
Paul: Yes. so far!. Maybe I’m just taking less risks now. Who knows?
Wrap
Albert: Well, that’s all for this week. Thanks for listening.
Luke: If there’s a future topic you’d like us to cover, you can message us on Twitter. I’m @LukeTelescope.
Albert: And I’m @AlbertTelescope, or you can email us at feedback@telescopeinvesting.com.
Luke: If you enjoyed today’s episode, you can find more content at our website, telescopeinvesting.com, where you can leave us a comment or a review.
Albert: And if this is your first time tuning in, perhaps consider subscribing to the website so that you’re the first to hear about new articles and episodes as they drop.
Luke: Thanks, Albert.
Albert: Thanks, Luke, and thank you, Paul.
Paul: Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great day.
Albert: You too.
Luke: Thanks, Paul.
