YouSaid · the spoken record

Benedict Evans

lines on the record: 119
first: 2018-05-03
most recent: 2018-05-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Since we're in Manhattan, imagine if you live in Brooklyn and it's November and you want to go to that cool new restaurant in Manhattan. How are you going to get there? Well, you could walk 10 minutes in the rain to the subway station. You could get a cab, well, presuming you can get a cab. Okay, it's going to cost you what, $20, $30 each way. You could drive, then one of you can't drink on the way back, and you're going to have to park and you have to pay for parking. It'll take you 20 minutes to find a place to park. There, let's not go out to that place. Okay, now go to a fully autonomous world. You raise your watch. You say, hey, Alexa, I need a car. The nipod that's around the block stops outside your door within 30 seconds. And there is no congestion. The pod just takes you there. It drops you off outside the door. If it's your pod, then it goes and waits for you somewhere where parking is cheap or it waits for you somewhere else. If it's an on-demand pod, it immediately starts driving other people around so there's no parking.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're going to go to JFK, then you would send a different vehicle. And so you can radically redesign the vehicle in the same way that when we got rid of the horse, you radically redesigned the vehicle. And you can also radically redesign the city or change your assumptions about the city in the same way that we did when we got rid of the horse, except that you're no longer trying to design a city that will constrain the 19-year-old guy on a soup-top Chevy Camaro. You're designing a city based on you can create rules. You can tell the cars where to go and what they can do and not do. You can have dynamic real-time road pricing. You can say, do you want to pay a lot to get there in 15 minutes or are you willing to pay less to get there in 30 minutes? You can tell the cars at any given instant which road safety should be taking and how fast they should be going. And so what you have is like a change in the structure of a city that has a lot in common with the way the city changed as a result of the car. Kind of the example I often give, which works well.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, no, basically no accidents because all the accidents are caused by human error. And you have much less congestion because you don't have traffic waves, you don't have accidents which cause a third of congestion or something. You can have vehicles on freeways driving at 100 miles an hour two feet apart from each other.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's what I hear when people say driverless car, that you've taken the steering wheel out maybe, but like nothing else has changed, and it will still drive around like autonomous cars mean cars that drive like people but without making mistakes or breaking the speed limit. That's just a really short-sighted way of thinking about this. I think there's kind of two kind of building blocks to think about. The first is if you have, when we have a fully autonomous world in end decades, 20, 30, 40 years, depending on what you think the SCODs will look like. And of course, you have periods where some places will be much go much quicker. So, like, you might say Manhattan is autonomous only in the week in 2030 or something. But at that point, there's no accidents.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think What can we say about this? So, first of all, the reason that we're talking about autonomous cars now is because of what we call AI, which really means this new technology called machine learning or technology that just started working called machine learning, which offers the prospect that a bunch of problems around autonomous cars might be solvable in a way that they really didn't seem to be easily solvable before. So in that sense, you could say autonomy is a spin-off of machine learning or the fact that we're interested in autonomy as a spin-off in machine learning, but there's all sorts of other stuff that machine learning does as well. As we go to autonomy, The way I kind of talk about this is I have a slide with a picture of a horse's carriage from like 1905. It's a carriage with a no horse, but otherwise nothing's changed.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was interesting simply that they were three weeks on. We're still having people are still writing explanations of what happened because it's all sort of fuzzy and opaque and no one quite understands what it means.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I mean, I was talking about this with somebody I think who's on Twitter, who's somebody who's had a journalism head of a journalism school, and they'd posted like an explanation of what Cambridge Analytica had been doing. In fact, this was three weeks ago.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they had a subscription model, would they not have had a developer platform? Would you not have been posting your personal stuff to your news feed? Why would that have made any difference?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You as a part of an audience. Well, it's interesting because in a literal sense, if you're an advertiser on Facebook, you don't get given a zip file of the profile of everybody who saw that. So in a literal sense, it's just not true. In a kind of a metaphorical sense, well, they're selling the fact that they know, like even in a metaphorical sense, that kind of struggles me. I struggle with that as a statement. But I think the fact that people have those conversations reflects, again, sort of unresolved feelings about how we should think about this stuff. It's the same with this idea that's going around now, that all the Facebook's problems can be blamed on the ad model. And you think, well,”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I find this interesting, there's a common meme even kind of in the tech industry where people say Facebook sells your information.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't feel like you would say stuff on Facebook that you expect to be secret. That's what I'm getting at. And I don't think many people ever actually thought that, which comes again to my point about sort of unresolved feelings. You can go to the extreme and say everything on Facebook should have been completely private and everyone should have understood that and everyone, you know, well, that's not realistic. But I don't think that's actually very realistic. I think it was much more kind of nuanced and fuzzy than that. No, I think you could argue everything in a WhatsApp group should be private, but I think that's a very different kind of form to posting on your news feed.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, no, it's more like people thought it was as public as stuff on their public profile. And I went, I joined Facebook in, I forget when it launched in the UK, but everyone's profile was public. I mean, it was public if you were in the London network. Right. So anyone could join the London network. So it was public. And then there was a period of like a year when everybody I've been at school at university with had a profile on Facebook and it was public and I could go and look. And then everyone kind of turned the privacy things on. And even then it's...”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even think beyond that. So, like, I've heard people say things like, I don't use Facebook. I wouldn't say that on Facebook Messenger because I don't want it to be public. And of course, Facebook Messenger isn't public. I mean, technically Facebook can, but anybody can screenshot it.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can't be a good person. I always kind of looked at it from the other end, which was I think people have, I think for years and years and years, people have just sort of presumed that nothing on Facebook was private. Right, that's correct. And therefore just sort of treated it as a public forum.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were a developer, if you were in tech, if you went to the developer event, they stood up on stage and said, hey, look, we leave our sables doorways, doors open, so you can do all this stuff. Isn't this great? And their stable doors were open for like five years. And then they go, maybe this isn't a good idea. We're going to close the door now. And a bunch of people said, oh, evil Facebook. You shouldn't close the doors. You should allow free open access. And now here we are in 2018, and people go, wow, a load of people went into the stable and stole all the horses Facebook are like yeah, but... We knew the doors were open. So there's a bunch of you can kind of see this as they try and work out how we talk about this. How do we think about this stuff?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say it is a little bit Apple popped up this said here is this capability Apple pops up the thing do you want this app to have your address or not and the sort of a point where it's not kind of black and white is not like somebody hacked into Google and gave them your email And so I think Facebook has been sort of, they have this record of pushing this thing to the kind of the outer envelope for the last 15 years. And I think what's happened here, slightly ironically, because they actually closed off all of these APIs like a couple of years ago. So sort of what's happened is the stable door was open.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People in the space, second order question, it needs their email address or their phone number to work. There is no other identifier. So it's got 600 people's email addresses. Okay, is that a breach of privacy?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really basic logical reasons why you wanted to do that. Okay, so that app has just downloaded 600 people's home addresses. That's a breach”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me give you a hypothetical You can install an app on your smartphone. It can pop up a box and ask for your friends. And there's an awful lot of sensible reasons like you're playing a game which of your friends are playing the game. You've installed an Instagram. Who are your friends so you can follow them? Uber ass.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's not like they found bugs in it, they're doing stuff that was in the textbook, that was in the manual, but you weren't expecting them to use them in those ways. And I think there's a very strong parallel there with what this Cambridge Analytica was doing, which was you are able to install an app, the app can get your information, the app can ask for your friend's information. If you say yes, it will get your friend's information. Yeah, but we didn't expect that people would use that to exfiltrate 80 million people's profiles, just as we didn't expect someone would make a Word document that could email a copy of itself to a million people.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not its intended purpose, exactly. But all of the individual APIs were there. And so you've got this period for Microsoft where they're thinking, okay, so are we supposed to not have macros? Are we supposed to be closed now? How do we think about this? And they had to go through this like 180 degree turn as they went from thinking we should make it as easy as possible for anybody to do this to what would happen. Going to moderate my language. What would happen if a bad person What my seven year old would call a dingly head decided to read the textbook.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, absolutely so Office is supposed to be an open development environment. The people suing them for antitrust are suing them for making it closed and hard for third parties to work with. So they create all these APIs and they create this whole macro language. One of the things on page 15 of the textbook is you can make a macro run when you open the document. Page 48 of the textbook, you can get it to look at your email addresses. Page 72 you can get it to send an email. Okay, so I get an email, a Word document, I open it. It emails a copy of itself to everyone in my address book Okay, that's not what we expected. Right. Clearly.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a large part of the advocacy around the tech industry was walled garden as a bad, Facebook is bad because it's closed, people need to be able to get their information out, you need to be able, other people need to be able to use this to innovate. So there was this whole sort of ideological argument that Facebook would be evil for not doing this, and Facebook needed to do this. So you create this platform. It turns out that people are able to exploit that and do stuff with it that was not really anticipated.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're comfortable that our mobile operators know where our phone is and that there's a kind of a legal apparatus around that that means that if the police need to know then they can find out but it's just not available to anybody. I think we sort of have that feeling around Google Mostly, I don't think we have like a resolved feeling around Facebook. Now, this particular story is sort of fascinating because of how many pieces there are to that. So Facebook creates this developer platform that allows you to install an app that can access your information and also access information about your friends. And there's a sort of a bunch of reasons why that would be useful. Like I want to create in a calendar entry or I want to, you know, I want to see who else is using this app.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we also think we also sort of think, well, maybe Facebook shouldn't be showing that at the top of the list. And we thought, well, he is my uncle and he did post it. So we have a bunch of sort of... Don't think we have a clear sentiment about other extreme. We are confident that we are comfortable with the fact that our banks know how much money we have.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a bunch of kind of unresolved feeling about Facebook. Is it private or public? If I post stuff in the newsfeed, will my friends see it or not? What does that mean? Do I want to share? How do I want to share this stuff or not? And like, we sort of understand that if you search on Google for something, it'll show you or try to show you what you asked for, even if it's something you shouldn't have searched for. We don't really feel like if my racist uncle posts that story on Facebook, should I see it or not? And how do we think about that?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's another expression of the same point. There's this classic joke in I read in a book by Castiglione, which is that somebody's dug a hole to build the foundation, to put up a building. And they ask their friend, what shall I do with all this earth that's come out of the hole? And their friend says, well, just dig another hole and put it in that. Well, it's just not going to work like that. You can't do it like that. And if you've created a system that lets anybody you've ever met send you anything that they feel like sending, then you're not going to be able to see it all. And there's not like some magic algorithm that's going to make that work. You're only ever going to have a sample.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“thought it by which are the ones that I want to see and so like you kind of create the same process over and over again now this is an opinion this may entirely be wrong this may not be how it works but you can certainly sort of see that problem that if you create tools that let everyone you've ever met share anything they've ever been interested in then you're not going to be able to read it all”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The random point factor being what time did I open the app? So the linear feed, the chronological feed is random. So then you say, well, maybe we should put the stuff that's important at the beginning, but then you think, okay, but now you are arguing, well, why isn't the Guardian or the New York Times at the top? That should be up at the top, because that's important. There's a public benefit to that. And you got this wrong. My friend posted this thing I wanted to see and I didn't see it. And so you get that sense of, well, maybe this isn't actually working and you have Russians trying to game it and you have all sorts of problems with trying to make that feed work. And so then you can say, well, actually what I want to do is if I really care about this stuff and I want people to see it, I'll send them a text message. I'll do it on WhatsApp. I'll do it on Facebook Messenger. But then I've got 15 parallel conversations or 20 parallel conversations with people. And then we start creating WhatsApp groups where 20 people from school can work and all talk to each other. And then everyone's like posting more and more stuff. And you think, I really like to have a screen in this app that just showed me the important stuff from all of these chats that I would see it. And maybe that should be...”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you've got these social apps which make it easy to post stuff and share stuff. And because it's one to many, you're not emailing it to someone or texting it to someone, you can post quite a lot because you don't feel like you're kind of imposing on people to do that. But you've got 200 friends and they post five things a day. Okay, now you've got 1,000 things a day in your newsfeed. And you can't read those. And so this is the logic that gets Facebook to producing what's called an algorithmic feed, which is just like engineers speak for, let's try and work out which of your friends we care about. And maybe we should put those at the top. And let's work out that you like these kind of things. You don't really like news stories from the Guardian. You prefer to look at pictures of babies. So let's put the babies in front of the new stories from the Guardian. And you kind of, you come up and you create that. And so now you've got, instead of, so to speak, a random sample, which is I open the app, what have people posted in the last hour? Because I'm not going to scroll past the last hour's worth of posts. So actually it's random.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there were kind of there, you know, and it's a comment about feature creep or whatever it is you want to say. And so there were these kind of inevitable processes or inevitable pieces of logic that kind of flow through. Now, the one that you were sort of quoted particularly was sort of an observation about, actually, I wrote a blog post about this last week. It's sort of a combination of Dunbar's number and Zuckerberg's law. If Dunbar's number is like, you know like 150 or 200 people well enough that you would trend them on Facebook at the very least”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. A colleague at Steven Sonowski who used to run office, he says, all products expand until they can edit photographs.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have notes through a blog post in my phone which is called something like technology determinism. And so there are, as it might be, half a dozen things which are just steady processes. And there are half a dozen things that are cycles. So steady process, the most obvious one would be Moore's law. There was a process of technology moves from research labs to startups to big companies. You can imagine half a dozen of those. Then there are cycles. And so there are cycles where you go from bundling to unbundling. You go from the client to the server and back again. You go from in the public.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's a famous investor whose name was somebody in Hollywood instead of a famous producer who said something like if I'd said yes to all the ones I said no to and no to all the ones I'd said yes to I would have come out exactly the same place so there's always you know this is kind of the indexing story there's always you can always kind of push these arguments and say well then we should just nobody knows anything and there's a little bit more to it than that”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the things that really work in a sense it doesn't kind of matter if this is, you know, if you've got, you know, give me kind of a hypothetical example. If you've got a $50 million seed fund and you make a significant investment in something that turns out to be worth $50 billion, does it really matter if it's worth $40 billion or $60 billion? What billion?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so. It depends, but the more progress you make and the more numbers you have, the more that you start looking at metrics and the less that you start thinking about potential. So sort of the super, super early stage, then the valuations all tend to look the same. As you go further in, then you start getting much more specific about, well, how well are they doing and what do we think this looks like? Then it gets sort You could do a sort of say If they manage to sell this thing to two billion people, well there'll be some value there. Trying to do a DCF on that? Well, okay, what does that get me? It doesn't tell me anything.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much that more iterate, I would say. Pivot is more like, okay, we built a whole company on that premise and that didn't work at all, so now let's try something else. That's not really the same thing. It's more kind of, well, we were kind of that and we sort of moved around. We found it worked. There's this whole sort of concept in Silicon Valley, a product market fit. And so you have sort of a product and you're trying to work out well what the market be and what would the product be around this space until we can find something that meshes and takes off. And so the earlier you are, the more, in a sense, you're betting on the ability of the founders to find that. But you're also betting on is this a great market? And is there some angle or some way that they're going to find in order to turn this into a thing?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I think most venture capitalists look at this stuff mostly in the same way. You can argue a little bit about emphasis. But there is the question of what is the market opportunity here and are these the people who are going to be able to work out, find, discover that market opportunity? Because inevitably it's not going to be exactly the original idea. It's going to be something sort of adjacent to that. You'll kind of twist around and find it.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I think the key way to think about Silicon Valley is it's a machine for running experiments. Most of the experiments won't work, and that's the plan. And yes, you know, you might, you know, you could do an experiment that's clearly a terrible idea and it was never going to work. And you could kind of mess it up and blow up your lab. And people will look down on you for that. But no one will look down on you for the fact that you ran an experiment and it produced a negative result. That was just, okay, well, we tried. Did you do the experiment right? That's a different question. But you ran the experiment. It didn't work. Okay, that's fine. and the ones that do work justify the whole exercise and pay for the whole exercise and produce mobile phones or produce Apple and Google and so on.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so everything you do has to be capable of being amazing. And if it's capable of going from two people and a PowerPoint to being an amazing thing worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it kind of has to be implausible and crazy. And there have to be a bunch of reasons why it might not work. And therefore, what you have to do is sort of suspend disbelief and not think here are all the reasons why this might not work. But what if this did work? What would it be? And are these the people who can make that happen?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's an interesting shift from being an equity analyst because you're right at one end of the risk reward profile. You know, if the town of Ben T-Bills is at the other end, you're at the stage where half of the deals you do will return less in invested capital, and that's the plan. And 5% will produce more than a 10x return. And that gets you a kind of a 3x return over 10 years.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The slow gradual improvement. And then there's a period at the end where they're like putting the facade on and doing all the fit out. And again, that looks boring. And so mobile is at the stage where, you know, you're putting the facade down and you're doing the fit out. And the other stuffs are still kind of hull in the ground and you can't really see what's going on. And so that means the character of the questions change.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, when the S-curve is going near vertical, then you're trying to work out, oh my God, what's going on? Is the rocket ship going to blow up? When is it going to start flattening out? Where we are now is we've got the old S curve has flattened out right at the top of the scale, and we're talking about what you can build on the top of it. And the new S curves are kind of under the radar, if I can mix my metaphors. One of the ways I describe this is kind of a good Manhattan metaphor. It's like you walk past a construction site every day for six months, and there's a bunch of construction workers kind of standing around, scratching their backs not doing anything. You think, oh, these guys are lazy. Then you walk past on Monday morning and they put 15 stories of steel frame up and you think, wow, they were really busy over the weekend.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, he threw chairs. But you were calling the plays. Is that the American phrase? You're trying to work out what was going on. Now we know what happened. And we don't have those kind of day by day tactical questions around autonomous cars because, like, there aren't any autonomous cars. We don't have those kind of day-by-day questions around mixed reality because you can't buy a mixed reality headset yet or have mixed reality glasses yet. So the character of the question changes because we're at a different point in the S curve.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right. I mean, that's partly a consequence of the state of the industry. So, like, five years ago, okay, it was a horse race. Who's going to win? Is it Apple and Google? What's going to happen? Is Apple going to survive even though Android has got this open story and this open source story and so on? So is there going to be room for Apple? Is there going to be room for a third entrant? What will happen to Blackberry? Will Blackbury killing on in a niche? Will Windows phone be able to break in? So all of that was the motor rating. I'm sorry.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think then within that, there's a kind of, you know, for what I try and do, there's a question of looking for the arguments or looking for the questions. So what are the places where there's an on the one hand on the other hand, is it going to look like this or is it going to look more like that? Are they going to be winner? Will there be autonomous cars? Yes. Not will it be in 15 or 20 years? Who knows? Don't know. It's more like, are there going to be winner-takes-all effects in this? Is it going to look like Android or is it going to look like ABS where there's like a widget that everyone buys and it doesn't matter? What's going to happen in mixed reality is this going to be something that's going to be every hardware manufacturer or is it going to be super concentrated? How do we think about machine learning? How do we try and understand what that might change inside big companies? And so kind of there's like what are the topics and then how do we work out what the kind of the useful questions to talk about might be within that?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you look, so there's one answer is well, what are the next questions? What are the next kind of mega trends that are happening? The second is there's a lot of conversation around what happens with that stuff, what happens with the stuff that we already had. So 10 years ago, what do we do with broadband and browsers? So let's talk about search. Let's talk about social. Let's talk about what happens once everyone has a PC. Now what happens once everyone has a smartphone and everyone is on Facebook. So we have those kinds of conversations about the world that we've just built, what happens with that. And then we think, well, what are the next things? So machine learning.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think talking about mobile now is a bit like talking about PCs 10 years ago. Like, yes, this is the center of everything, but it's happened. And so we're not arguing about iOS versus Android or whether everyone's going to have one of these things or apps versus the web or all of those kind of things. Those are not interesting conversations anymore. It's like arguing, you know, is everybody getting going to get onto the web? Well, yes, now what? Next question.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you need a resume. It's kind of like if you want a sales job, you should be able to get the meeting. If you can't get the meeting, you shouldn't have a sales job. And it's kind of the same. You prove that you can do the job by doing it.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I got a couple of introductions. I went in and I said, well, sort of this is sort of what I do. Is there a place for this in this firm? Does this fit within the firm? Is this useful? And they kind of said, yeah.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source