Came across this book on the shelf, couldn’t help it but pick it up and started reading it. Came across this section which I would love to quote. The setting was Changez, the main character graduated from Princeton, summa cum laude, and was in an interview with Underwood Samson an elite valuation consultancy firm.
I’m going to give you a business case, a company I want you to value…The company is simple. It has only one service line: instantaneous travel. You step into its terminal in New York, and you immediately reappear in its terminal in London. Like a transporter on Star Trek. Get it? Good. Lets go.â€â€¦My essence was focused on finding my way through the case. I started by asking questions to understand the technology: how scalable it was, how reliable, how safe. Then I asked Jim about the environment: if there were any direct competitors, what the regulators might do, if any suppliers were particularly critical…And at the end, I arrived at a number. “Two point three billion dollars,†I said. Jim was silent for a while. Then he shook his head. “Wildly overoptimistic,†he said. “Your assumptions on customers adopting this thing are way too high. Would you be willing to step into a machine, be dematerialized, and then recomposed thousands of miles away? This is exactly the kind of hyped-up bullshit our clients pays Underwood Samson to see through.â€
Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid