It's easier to add an app to infrastructure, an infrastructure to an app.

Think about your competition or who can replace you.

It might not be a peer.

Like, what's the entity that has the stuff, can do the stuff that we do

and can possibly do it with better scale and everything else?

Because it wasn't really a, hey, some other player in the space outdid them.

It was the existing infrastructure

was able to come in and say, we appreciate you doing all the product market fit and the R&D

and all that. And we'll take over now. Thanks a lot. I'm Mary Long and that's Patrick Battalado.

He's an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin's McComb School

of Business, where he teaches

accounting. He's also a returning guest to Motleyful Money. My colleague, Ricky Mulvey, caught up with

Battalado for a conversation about what we can learn from companies that brought great ideas to

life, but a struggle to turn those ideas into successful, growing businesses. They also talk about what went wrong with

Blue Apron and Beyond Meat, when to be wary of the Lynchian approach, expanding your definition

of competition, and the importance of testing out ideas with other people.

So we had a discussion on the show about a month ago. I was talking to Anthony Chavone,

specifically about apartments in multifamily reits in the Sun Belt area, where investors got a

trend right, but the stock ended up being kind of a loser, which was a lot of people are going to

move to the Sunbelt area when you can work from home. Things are a little bit sunnier there. And what's ended up happening is there's been a

little bit of a period of overbuilding remote work, sort of the demand for remote work has

evened out, I would say. And now you have a stock like Mid-America apartments, which has gone

...