There is a category of business that does not care who wins. It does not care which brand you choose, which store you walk into, or which flight you book. It only cares that something happened - that money changed hands, that a transaction occurred, that activity flowed through.
These are the toll booths.
Infrastructure Indifference
Consider the difference between betting on a shoe company and betting on the payment network. The shoe company needs you to choose their shoes. They need to win against every other shoe company, every substitute good, every shift in fashion. One bad quarter, one factory scandal, one counterfeit ring - and the thesis breaks.
The payment network does not care whose shoes you bought. It does not care if you bought shoes at all. It gets paid when the card swipes. Every card, every store, every transaction. Trillions of dollars a year flowing through the same rails, and they take a fraction of a percent of all of it.
Bet on the swipe, not the shoe.
The Pattern Repeats
You see this structure everywhere once you start looking for it:
Cloud providers do not care which app succeeds. They get paid when compute runs.
Search engines do not care which link you click. They get paid when you search.
Payment processors do not care which merchant thrives. They get paid when money moves.
Real estate landlords do not care which tenant draws the crowds. They get paid when rent is due.
The toll booth sits at the chokepoint and collects from everyone who passes through. It does not need to predict the winner. It only needs the road to stay busy.
Why This Matters
Picking winners is hard. Genuinely hard. Even professionals with teams of analysts and decades of experience get it wrong constantly. The company you thought was going to dominate gets disrupted by something nobody saw coming. The brand you loved loses its edge. The market shifts.
But picking activity is easier. Will people continue to buy things? Will they continue to travel? Will they continue to use the internet? These are much simpler questions to answer, and the answers tend to be yes.
The toll booth approach is not about predicting the future. It is about positioning yourself to benefit from a range of futures - any future where activity happens, where transactions occur, where the road stays busy.
The Tradeoff
Nothing is free. Toll booth businesses tend to grow more slowly than the fastest winners in their ecosystem. If you bet on the shoe company and it becomes Nike, you massively outperform the payment network. The payment network is steady, predictable, boring.
But boring has its advantages. Boring survives. Boring compounds. Boring does not blow up because of a supply chain issue in Vietnam or a CEO who said something stupid on Twitter.
There is a place for taking shots. There is also a place for owning the infrastructure that everyone else depends on regardless of who takes the shot and who misses.
The Meta-Lesson
This extends beyond investing. Any time you have to make a bet on an uncertain future, ask yourself: can I position at the chokepoint instead of picking a winner?
Learn skills that matter across industries, not just the hot one. Build relationships with people who will matter regardless of which company wins. Own assets that benefit from activity, not just outcomes.
The toll booth does not care who wins.
That is the point.