Interview: Hamilton Helmer & Chenyi Shi on How to Build an AWS-Like Second Business

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

7 Powers author Hamilton Helmer and his Strategy Capital colleague Chenyi Shi join us again to discuss their latest research on a topic that’s highly relevant to the recent Acquired canon: how to build a second business line. This incredibly important “transforming” question faces every great company who has achieved initial product success (as well as their investors). Do we continue solely along the established path, or do we attempt to grow new branches on the tree? Some companies grow new businesses with tremendous success — Amazon and AWS, Nintendo and video games, Nvidia and CUDA — yet many others fail miserably. For the first time Hamilton and Chenyi share their research-based playbook on how companies should approach this decision and choose wisely. Tune in!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, I'm sorry before you keep going is this going to be a question of is this a scale economy or network economy?
0:05.6	Yes. Oh, damn go for it Jenny because I don't know the answer
0:10.5	We've stumped the experts
0:12.5	Who got the truth?
0:15.5	Is it you, is it you, is it you?
0:17.5	Who got the truth now?
0:20.5	Is it you, is it you, is it you?
0:22.5	Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way
0:27.5	Who got the truth?
0:29.5	Welcome to this special episode of acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
0:36.5	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:37.5	I'm David Rosenthal.
0:38.5	And we are your hosts.
0:40.5	Eight years ago, I pitched David on an idea for two different podcasts.
0:45.5	One was on grading technology acquisitions that became acquired.
0:50.5	The other idea was to do episodes on companies that managed to create two separate multi-billion dollar innovations.
0:58.5	Our hypothesis is that most companies have really one big founding insight and that the rest of the company's history is just drafting on that.
1:07.5	Hamilton Helmer and Chen Yishi, friends of the show, coincidentally have been exploring literally exactly that idea
1:14.5	And they've been asking questions like what percent of the profits of the biggest companies in the world came from a second business line.
1:23.5	They have a new framework in addition to seven powers to help founders answer the transforming question.
1:30.5	If I were to expand the scope of what my company does, how should I go about it?
1:35.5	And this is a particularly interesting time to do this episode with them because I feel like a bunch of the companies we've covered recently on the show.
	...

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