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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I kind of picked out my bag and thought, well, what else do I want to do? What do I want to do next? Where could I deploy this? And you have those conversations at various stages in your life. And I thought, well, I should go and do this in venture capital. And where's the place to go and do venture capital? And the global cluster is San Francisco. And what was the kind of firm where it felt like this kind of innovative approach to explaining things and adding value in public would work? And A16Z was sort of at the top of that list.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they would be writing for a very different audience. They'd be writing for buy, sell, hold audience. Or they wouldn't have the analytic background to write it. So, like a sell-side analyst could write this stuff, but they're writing for a different audience. Senior person at a company knows all of this stuff, but they're not used to writing stuff and they can't publish it anyway. Somebody at McKinsey knows all this stuff, but they're not allowed to say that's not going to work. So I was kind of an interesting kind of niche in the vendor, kind of little segment on your Venn diagram of somebody who had an analytic and strategy background, was used to writing about this stuff and explaining it, could say it in public at a time when a very few other people were doing it. And so for those reasons, I sort of got noticed. And, you know, I spent like two or three years writing blog posts and getting like 100 page views a month. And then I went through a period where I was getting a couple of thousand page views a day. And that sort of happened in the course of 2013.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, that's an old and boring story of what happened there. And then I went as a consultant in London. So I was doing a lot of sort of strategy consultancy and producing research reports around the European media and telecom space. And so I was writing both about kind of what's happening in fashion magazines and record retail and DVD retail, but also what are Google and Facebook doing, what's happening with smartphones. And so I started a blog and more or less the same time I went on Twitter at that time, which was kind of new and so it was quite easy to get noticed if you were doing stuff. And I was kind of writing stuff. The way I describe it is basically I would write stuff that a cell site analyst or a senior strategy person or someone at Apple could write except that either they couldn't publish it.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did that for a while. I left NBC Universal the week that General Electric's share price fell 50%, which is obviously a direct causal relationship.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there's a process here. And as I mentioned, I actually did my degree in history, which is analysis. And so the question was sort of picking up and looking for things where you can apply that to analysis. And so I left university and became a sell-side analyst and as sort of many people will know that for many various reasons stopped being a fun thing to do or even a thing that anyone could do. So I think when I was in telecoms, Merl Lynch, Europe had something like 50 European telecoms analysts. And the last time I looked, I think they had less than half a dozen. So that industry ceased to be fun. And so I left and went and worked in strategy first at Orange and then at NBC Universal and Channel 4, again both in London. So from sort of sitting on the outside in, sitting on the inside out, trying to work out what we do and how do we understand this. And it's kind of interesting because the questions change. And suddenly you've got a spreadsheet that lists all the stuff you've been trying to work out from the public financials. But then you're just trying to work out different stuff. But the process is the thought process of the stuff.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just ask them for a job. I don't know why people say it's hard to get a job in venture. You ask them for a job, they say yes. That's it. Yeah, it was easy. How did you first?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. One of the ways I describe this when I talk to telcos now is it's as though a municipal water company looked at the mineral water business and they said, you know, come on, we've got brand, we've got water, we've got trust, you wouldn't buy water from a company you don't trust. We should be doing that. Never heard of. And they hire McKinsey and Wolf Hollins and they build the whole thing. And like two years later, that first pallet of water rolls into Walmart and it goes onto the shelves and they look at it next year at the 200 brands. And they think, how on a second, there's something not quite right here.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, what we had instead was permissionless innovation in the open internet, and there was no central authority, and anyone could do what they wanted just to some extent. And so that is interesting to compare that now with a way we, for example, people talk about cars or the way people talk about what's happening to TV now. I think the kind of, as I just said, the fact that you could have guessed like 80 or 90% of it and still have missed the important parts is also fascinating. You could have said in 2000, okay, everyone will have one of these things, everyone will have internet on their phone, it will be a real operating system and not a feature phone. It will be open internet. Therefore, it will not be the carriers. That would have described today's world perfectly, but you would have still said, well, then it'll be Microsoft and Nokia that do that.”
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, as I said, I think there's sort of several bits you can learn from not so much to drop the bubble per se, but the kind of the way people thought about it. And so there was this whole idea in the early 90s. Which holds just the name conveys the fact that it was going to be kind of centrally controlled and it would be the cable company and news corporation and 20th century Fox and the New York Times and they would kind of get together every six months and decide what you were going to have. And”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you think, well, you might get like three quarters of this right, but like the last quarter of it is going to be where all the money is. And that's the difference between it being Nokia and Microsoft and it being companies you've never heard of, like Apple and Samsung and Google or forgotten like Apple. And no one had ever heard of Google. And so it's interesting to look back and think, how did we think about what was going to happen then and how much of it was right and wrong? Or what would you have had to have said then in order to get it right?”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a lot of echoes of that, for example, if you look at cars now. You have this, all this futurology of what's going to happen and what cars will be and how everything will change. And you have kind of the renderings of the glass cars, which is like the renderings of the glass phones in 2000 when there were no phones with color screens.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two years of exaggerated effect. But so you look at all the stuff we do on our smartphones now, this was all kind of in concept videos and presentations from the mobile operators in like 97, 98, 99. You were going to do all of this stuff and they were going to do it all. And of course, it all happened, but it wasn't done by them. And so that perspective of how kind of...”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's kind of interesting. I mean, there's a couple of different things there. One of them is it's interesting in hindsight to look at them in hindsight in that they were the go-go growth exciting dynamic sexy disruptive companies. I mean, mobile had gone from nothing in 1990 to, oh my God, everyone on earth is going to have one of these things. And they were really kind of, they thought of themselves as pirates Connected everybody, and that was it, and you know, obviously, there's still a lot of stuff going on in emerging markets, but like everyone in Europe got a phone and that was it. And then they went from being amazing. They went from being Google to being water companies in like a year.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I worked for Orange, so I went to Paris and I worked for NBS Universal, so I came to New York, but my jobs were always in London.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so I mean, I came to New York for work. I worked for NBC Universal, so I used to come over here. But no, the first time I actually worked properly in the States was to go to work for a 16Z.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I did my degree in history, which is really an analytic subject. So here is a bunch of information, try and work out something interesting or meaningful or insightful to say about it or something original and interesting to say about it. And so I went from that into sort of fairly conventional route into investment banking and sort of quickly decided that ECM was kind of project management and whereas research was probably something I was likely to be better at. And so I went into equity research and I went and did European mobile stocks for a couple of years.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had a tech bubble, but you also had a mobile bubble. Which are very only for very distant reasons was happening at the same time, but was happening at the same time, and then there was the fiber bubble. And yes, so they all combined, and we got this enormous kind of explosion, and then an enormous pop and the market went down without stopping more or less for three years.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is easy, you just throw it out. Yeah, it's up 10F. You issue some random thing and a sovereign wealth fund puts in an order for 3X to float. And then in about early spring of 2000, everything started going down. And we sort of forget now that we talk about the dot-com bubble, but particularly in Europe, there was also a mobile bundle, there was also a mobile bubble, and there was also the fixed-line broadband fiber bubble. So you kind of had three bubbles that kind of had happened more or less independently for different reasons and kind of merged and combined into one enormous thing. And then the market went down for three years.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I actually joined an equity capital markets team. So we were doing European Tech IPOs in 1999. And so for about nine months, I thought, oh, this is going to be a fun career.”
2018-05-03 · Masters in Business · Benedict Evans Talks About the Tech Bubble · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source