Price is what you pay today; value is what compounds over decades. A Picasso napkin sold for millions because of decades of skill, not minutes of work. A senior consultant's hourly rate, multiplied over a career, justifies tens of millions in value when applied to billion-dollar problems.
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Right, as you can see, we got some snow. A little bit. Maybe you can't see. It's a light dusting, light little dusting down here. So I got like snow on my feet out here. Shit. All right, uh, price versus value. Let's talk about it. Let's get into it. Um, let's start with an old story. Picasso, the famous artist. You may have heard this one, but Picasso was in a cafe and he was scribbling on a little piece of paper or napkin and drew something, drew something pretty neat. And, um, he was going to throw it away, and I think a woman came up to him, or a man, who knows, doesn't really matter. And, uh, like tried to grab it like out of the garbage. And he's like, no, you can't have it. It'll cost you $60,000. She goes, well, what do you mean? Like you were just gonna throw it away. And he's like, yeah, but the value is worth $60,000 today. And given time, she probably should have taken that deal. But the point was that— and she was like, but it only took you like a minute to draw. And he's like, yeah, it didn't take me a minute. It took me— 10 years. 60 years, 30 years, all the way up until this point to draw that thing. So it's an oft-cited example, but it matters quite a bit because it's chilly out here. Um, it matters. It matters because value is very different than price. Value doesn't change as often as price. And Oftentimes value, if it really is valuable and have intrinsic value, gets more valuable over time to the point where you can't even see how much more valuable it will become. Take vintage watches, for example. What used to cost $1,500 maybe back in the day in the '70s or '80s today is over $100,000, in some cases over $1 million. For something that people didn't even want back then. And that just shows you, like, sometimes the test of time showcases value more than wherever the trend cycle is. So when you're talking about, like, your own product or service and people try to beat you up on price, I think you really— before you even get to price, you just have to establish what you think the present value of that Future cash flows, present value is in that object, in that digital thing, in that experience that you're providing. And so I'll give you an example. Um, take minimum wage in the United States. It's like maybe around $7 right now. When I was a kid, it was like $5.25, and I was making minimum wage. My first job, uh, collecting carts in a grocery store and, uh, and pushing like maybe only 5 at a time up a hill in the snow both ways. Not both ways, just one way. Uh, it was uphill. Sucked. Wasn't fun. Uh, my first paycheck was like $88. Not cool. Um, but here we are. So imagine that $5.25, $7, whatever minimum wage is, times 2,080 hours in a year, times 30 years. That's— and you did that thing over and over again. You became best in the world at that because you found nuance, you found capabilities, you'd been through every possible experience, almost the black swan events, the ups, the downs. And you could very quickly put a masterclass together on how to collect cards or whatever the thing is. And if you multiply that out, like $7 times 20, 80 times 30 years, you're gonna get millions of dollars. So the price point for you to deliver a talk, let's say, deliver a service, deliver a product that solves that problem, that's worth millions of dollars. Just that alone. It might astound people. Now, the question is really, is someone going to pay that price? So like, let's take it up a notch to the people that, you know, are sort of supposed experts in the world. Let's take like a McKinsey consultant. So McKinsey is like one of the sort of highest respected brands. They are the Pixar, the Disney, the Apple of, let's say, management strategy consulting, one of the OGs. Um, and so sometimes, like, even like a law firm, right? Like, your senior partners may charge $1,000 an hour, a couple thousand bucks an hour. Let's do that same math times 20/80 times 30 years. You're upwards of $60 million, $100 million is what that's worth when you have that person sit down with you. $100 million. Now, who's gonna pay $100 million? Like, that sounds crazy, right? No. And I'll tell you why. Because there's ROI on top of that. You can apply that $100 million to a certain problem space at the planetary scale and get a 10x, 100x, maybe 1,000x return on that. We've actually seen that. Pro athletes, you see that sometimes, but they're capped. Why? Because there's only so many people that can fit in a stadium. And not everybody loves the sport of baseball or basketball, and they watch it for like pennies on the dollar on TV or whatever. But let's take technology, right? Technology, especially AI, um, that's a planetary-scale technology. When there's 6 billion people on the internet every day, going up to 8 billion soon, times just a dollar a year, That alone is $6 billion per year in revenue right there alone. So your $100 million starts to get pretty tiny. And the global GDP is probably $100, $120 trillion. So given you are really good at what you do and you can move the needle even 0.1%, I'll pay you any amount of money possible. And you saw this recently With AI people getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars like a professional athlete, because the scale is much larger than athletics and the return is much larger than just a single player on a single sport, because that one cornered resource, defensibility— ding, ding, ding, quiz question— is worth billions of dollars. So when you come and you ask us a trillion-dollar question, do not be surprised if our price point is $100 million, because that is the difference between winning and losing, between an outcome, between being in a competitive space or being the only game in town. Because we got things that nobody else in the world has. And you know where that came from? It came from 30 years being on the internet in ways you can see and cannot see, in ways we've discussed and have not discussed, um, nor will we. And so there is massive upside. And the real question then is one of purpose and values and alignment. The question is, who has the taste, the values, the capabilities such that we want to work with them? And that's the vibe. That's the vibe. And that's the difference between price and value. Someone who's $5 an hour and someone who's worth a trillion dollars. Because a single idea, a single word or phrase, Can flip a perspective, can set a vector, can set a North Star such that the whole world can align on that, and competitive dynamics can be set up such that all the dominoes ripple into place over time, and it hits that exact target exactly at the moment when you want it to hit. Um, Difficult to do, but not impossible. So I ask you, do you have something like Picasso that's worth $100 million? How about a billion? And not in today's money, in tomorrow's money, because the value of things are only going up and up and up. And it requires an incredible amount of taste Nuance, detail, strategy, experience, speed, power, relationships, yada yada, intelligence, you name it. So the ball is squarely in your court, and the question is, what court are you on? What kind of ball are you holding? Is it a ball? What game are you playing? Whose game are you playing? Did you create the game? Now we're starting to talk. All right, so if you, um, if you want to make a trillion bucks, boy, do I have some ideas for you.
