YouSaid · the spoken record
Brian McCullough
- lines on the record
- 108
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- 2022-03-10
- most recent
- 2022-03-10
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- 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
“Because there's the quotes from the VCs in there, number one, where they're like, we don't have to back a successful company because all we got to do is get it out the door and get it public, right? And the way.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's the great companies that survived. There's the really well-intentioned good ideas that just didn't happen to make it. And then at some point there is this sort of cynical because there's the quotes from the VCs.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the way you've described in your book is so you sort of have, I don't remember the years exactly, but like 95 ish, you have some like high quality companies, 96, it's more of that. At some point, maybe 99 is when it turns. You get cynical. At some point, you do get the sort of the hucksters and the cynicism and just like pure business plans IPO. So I think there's like...”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the fun excess and things like that. I don't blame the people involved at all because no one knew. And anybody that tells you from that time, oh, well, we were successful because we, no, come on. It was just random chance in a lot of cases. Proven out by the fact that the vast majority of them were e commerce plays, right?”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Normally, you're looking for what's a good idea. When you invent the internal combustion engine, you have a pretty good idea, you're eventually going to move people and goods on it. That's right. That's right. But no one even knows. It's like that analogy of the elephant. Like you're looking at the elephant, somebody sees a tail, somebody sees a toe. No one really knows what they're looking at.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if it is like you're searching on more degrees of freedom than normally, normally you're looking for what's a good. Here you're trying to figure out what's a good product, what's a good business model, what's a good, like just so much was unknown. When you invest”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bad side. Yeah, let's talk about that. Sure Yeah, and so part of it is excusable by the fact that any new technology is a lot of entrepreneurs feeling around in the dark to see what actually works. But this was more so than most because no one knows anything. No one knows if you can successfully do commerce on the internet at the beginning. No one knows like...”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like the bad side of the bubble. The bad side. Yeah, let's talk about that. So you're talking about just the froth and the bad companies and the whole kind of hysteria. Yeah. Yeah.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that right? I think they only recently shut that business down. They probably felt bad because someone bought them and you had to support it. I don't know. Anyways, so that's an amazing story. I don't know. You tell me what other, I mean, there's a whole bunch of great stories in here.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Publicly Well, they had this whole real. This sounds crazy today, but they had a real effort to do that, they were going to sell Google Boxes, which is where this enterprise search, because everyone knew consumer had no business model. And there's like, I remember there's a great business article from like 2000, like, you know, awesome search engine, how will they ever make money? Another one of these pipe dream Silicon Valley things. And they literally, it was like a little cell box. It's $100,000. You put it in your data center. It collects your corporate documents. I think we're still manufacturing.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the classic eyeballs attention thing. Bell, or something Them off With no business As I point out in the Everyone says it's not going to. Their investors have said publicly that we were starting to get a little itchy. Are you guys ever going to?”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Purely on AdWords. Yeah. A market where it's win win win. Well, the other fascinating thing, right, is all of the pressure at the time was around so that everyone thought the only possible business model for search was sort of the portal model, which was to have banner ads. And surrounded by celebrity news and all sorts of stuff. It's the classic eyeballs attention. And so there was all these famous stories. I think with George Bell or something where, you know, and I'm not taking, I'm not criticizing these executives at all because that was the business model all the time. But the whole thing was I don't want a search engine that's too good that gets them off my site because that destroys my business model. So like the other brilliant thing that Larry and Sergei did, right, beyond everything else was stick to their principles kind of crazily, right? With no business model at all in sight. As I point out in the work. And we're going to go against the entire industry and we're going to just bet that a business model will come along that's going to work. Everyone says it's not going to. They're investing.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's just the right rail without the left. And then that original model, because again, I built one of my first companies purely on AdWords. So imagine this perfect three-sided market where as an advertiser, I'm paying less per click if my ad is more relevant. Because I remember, like, I used to be paying $2 or whatever over on GoTo and all of a sudden I'm paying 30% a click because my ad is better. And as it gets better, it goes down. Google's making more money because they know that someone might be bidding a dollar but only be clicked on a certain amount of times if you bid five cents but get clicked on 30 times we make more money and they did those they did that actual A-B testing where it's like the usually preferred the ads because if the organic results are good yeah maybe these paid results also might have some benefit you know for certain use cases so people actually searched more once they put the ads up so it's the perfect three-state market whereas win-win win well the”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Play thing. It was like for people today, it's like just the SEM without the SEO, it's just the right rail without the left.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had great, like, GoTo did never have great organic results. They just had resolved. It was just a pure. Go to was a pure”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can You kind of stole it. They didn't steal it. Somebody else invented it. The quality score stuff. Right, exactly. Yeah”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like confluence Overture, go to originally, and then over I just gave a talk a couple weeks ago at Google. It posted recently. And I said to them, I was like, I don't know how to say this here, but obviously you guys, your first miracle was you solve search. God bless. How can we function today without that? Your number two miracle is that you created the greatest advertising machine ever devised by humanity. But actually, you didn't create, you kind of stole it. They didn't steal it. Somebody else invented it. Someone else invented it because they actually made it functionally better. You know, that's the Google story. There's no problem that they don't think that they can do better.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough So it's like Google a little bit. So I think to me there's many remarkable things about Google, but perhaps what's remarkable is the business model, which kind of, and like the most serendipitous confluence in history, right, you create the most popular, I mean, you sort of think, I mean, they were brilliant, of course, and invented all this amazing stuff, but they build this incredibly valuable search engine, incredibly effective and useful. The web, of course, explodes in use in value and broadband and smartphones and all that. But then this company called GoTo originally and then Overture for sort of completely a little bit orthogonal reasons invents the greatest business model of all time, which happens to tuck perfectly into Google's model. I just gave a talk.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one Number one, they trust Google to have the math to at least take down the piracy enough. Number two, Google had already proven Adwards and was making billions of dollars a year at these little contextual ads. And so Google can come to the table with them from day one once they own YouTube and say, hey, there's money here. Do you want a piece of this? So as opposed to Napter, which didn't have that built out, so they're begging the record companies to come to their platform that they're going to build. They haven't done it yet. But they don't have in place any monetization. So from day one, once YouTube is under Google's wing, Google has at least something. It wasn't what they wanted. It wasn't going to replace their existing business models, but something was better than nothing.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And do tests with them as a platform, right? And that then when YouTube and Netflix came along, the movie and TV folks industries had seen what happened to the music industry and were savvier this time, right? Instead of just sort of saying let's just fight it tooth and nail, maybe we can make it work for us.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but let's say that the record companies had been willing to at least playball a little bit and do tests with them as a platform, right? Think of the counterfactual there. Where would if Apple launches the iPod, how does that eventually gain traction other than being something that then if Napster is popularized is just an accessory to Napster, right? And then if that model had been proven, who's to say that they wouldn't have been the ones to go because it's the next obvious thing to video streaming and things like that? So, you know, Netflix had the road open to them because there was no one else doing it, but like there could have been a player already there that had proven success through this model and would obviously have gone into video.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% And so, you know, the direct analogy is Spotify, right? You could have had a Spotify in 1999 or 2000 at the very least. This is, again, classic disruption stuff. You can't convince an industry at the height, 1999, I think is the height in they're doing $20 billion because of the seedy format. And all that classic stuff. But at the same time, there's other reasons why Napster didn't work out. They couldn't attract the best talent. And the legal stuff happened from day one.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enough and have a reasonable price. That's right. That's right. So it turns out we now know that their value proposition actually was, as they claimed, a great deal of it was about convenience and not about stealing. 100%.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what they had. And had they been able to convince anyone of that in 1999, it would be a completely different media landscape. And the only problem that they had is, you know, don't pick a fight with an industry that has literal mob ties going back to its very founding days.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that turns out that's a very profitable thing. You don't have to deal with all of the. That's another one where I discovered what that was about while doing it because, and we all think Napster is about piracy, it's about disruption of a media industry that can't get with the times quick enough and was dug their heels in stubbornly. But no. And I got this by interviewing some of the Napster guys where they're making their case. And then when you do the research, you see their quotes from 1998, 99. They're screaming this from the rooftops. The story of Napster is Today we live in a world for media of unlimited selection and instant gratification. If I tell you about a TV show, movie, book, whatever, we just did that with our phones. You expect to be able to pull it up in five seconds and at least sample it or probably consume it, right?”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely why they're so valuable because that turns out that's a very profitable thing you don't have to deal with all the inventory and everything else. It's funny you still see that on like Twitter people are like, you know, how could Uber be more valuable than, I don't know, what Hertz or something they don't own things. It's like, well, that's actually a feature, not a bug from a PNL perspective. That's interesting. I guess some other interesting ones. So Napster, that was one I learned a little bit more. I mean, I knew this published story, but that's another one where I.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rating system. And then the third one is just the fact that, and I do argue this maybe around the edges, there are others, but they were the first company to succeed at our business model is just whatever our users are doing on our platform. And I tell the story in the book that like Jess Skull is, the newspapers were not dumb no matter what anyone says. They were kicking the tires. They knew that this was a threat to their classified ads business. But one of the guys says to Jeff, my C-suite's not going to sign off on buying you because you don't own anything. You don't own trucks. You don't own factories. And that's common throughout the digital era. But also, they couldn't wrap their minds around the fact that you're not even taking possession of the goods. All you're doing is letting people interact, right? And so, again, where would social media be some of the most powerful, valuable companies in the world don't own anything?”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, Pyrrha Midiar did not want to have to settle the disputes between users, so he just created a system out of laziness that was like, all right, you can accrue reputation, and if you don't defend that reputation, it's going to harm you. And so that was actually one of the key reasons that they, because Amazon came after them, Yahoo, auctions came, you know, people, once they invested in that reputation system enough, they're not going to go to the other platform, right? Trust people.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System could funct Did he invent that or popular? That must have been a concept in life. I'm sure, of course. Back from the Usenet or some shit. I'm sure, of course, they did not invent it.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would Uber, Airbnb, go down the list, or they proved that a non-hierarchical, sort of self-organized reputation system could function online, maybe not perfectly, but well enough to achieve scale, to be good enough most of the time.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google, eBay, Amazon Today And I was surprised that I discovered that in writing the chapter. I knew I was going to write about eBay. So there's three things that they do that I argue are super influential and they deserve more credit for laying the groundwork for this. Number one, they teach normal people to trust faceless strangers from across the country online, right? When I was doing the library research for this, as late as like the Christmas of 98 and 99, people are wondering if e-commerce is ever going to take off because they can't convince enough people to put their credit cards online. Like we're in a completely through the looking real ass world now in terms of that sort of stuff. But so the fact that eBay trained normal people that you can trust faceless masses, we should not underestimate the people that were the training wheels for the modern digital era. And so just doing something like that is key. The second thing that is key is that, like I said, these are masses that are self-organizing. And so we live in the tyranny of the five-star rating system.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had the vision Because For normal people to adopt. Interesting. And then you talk about a bunch of interesting, obviously sort of the iconic companies, I guess, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, Amazon. eBay is an interesting one because I think of the, you know, well, they're all interesting, but obviously Google and Amazon are wildly powerful companies today, Yahoo, of course, had its sort of fall and was kind of replaced by Google. I think eBay is interesting because there's still an important company. They're a big company, but we don't think of them as, or they're not sort of GAFA, they're not the four big ones. But from a product point of view, I think you argue in some ways could be the most influential internet company. And in some ways, the truest internet company.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about networking. And so that's the only thing. I'm not calling Bill Gates stupid at all in the book. He had the vision. He just bet on the wrong horse because he thought that it was too nerdy for normal people to adopt.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, makes sense. Okay, so there's that. So to me, that beginning part was really interesting, the sort of top down, bottom up battle. And in fact, like I think you had in the book, I'd seen this before, but Bill Gates' first version of the road ahead, which came out in 95 or something”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And get some fired up The obvious analogy to think of today is like VR is still not only can you not get mainstream people to adopt it, but it's still relatively difficult. And you have to be super sophisticated to create decent VR experiences.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's easy to use because you can get it on Windows Yeah, yeah, I see. So you need sort of the one side that kind of inspires people and gets them fired up and the other side that lets them then go.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And put up a website. So it's that sort of chicken and egg thing where people see the web for the first time in the mosaic browser because it's easy to use because you can get it on Windows. And they say, I want to create a cool thing like what I just saw. And so it's easier for them to go off and create that cool thing. Right. You need both sides of it.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him and then also the academics and other people who made DNS, for example, the fact that it was permissionless, the fact that a hobbyist and a university could be on sort of level playing field with Disney on the web, right? And put up a website and...”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's two. And so for that, we have to credit Berners Lee, of course, because not only does the web bring sexiness to the internet, the internet had been around by 25, 30 years at that point, but the pictures and the things and the cat videos, like that gets normal people involved, but Berners-Lee and HTML is so dead simple that you have to only be minimally sophisticated to be able to develop for it, right? So we have to give them credit.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the date that But I would also, maybe I'm promoting my own view of the world here too much. But I would also argue it's very important that the people that are excited in the beginning are also people like who are able to build websites or build code or write clients or do whatever. The fact that a lot of them were software developers or computer enthusiasts, right? The same with the early PC. You didn't just want people to use it. You want people to write spreadsheets and word processors and do all that stuff.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just good enough was better. They knew it was going to come 2002. They weren't wrong. That's the date that Barben started to penetrate and things like that. So they thought they had time was the key essence. And they thought that, okay, we'll all play nicely together. We'll all take our piece of the pie or whatever. So it's classically out of nowhere from the bottom up, like you're saying. It was almost like the PC too, because it's hobbyists that want to do this thing. So people see the early web and pictures are enough. Little postage size videos are enough to do cool things at the beginning. Now, then you have the crazy people that come on top of that and say, can I do commerce on top of this? Can I build an actual business on top of this? But what you need first is you need the technology to be good enough to excite a sort of like enough people to accept the limitations of the good enough technology. And then if you reach a critical mass there, then you can at least build businesses off those early adopters.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still the underdog We're almost saying it's obvious the lesson is sometimes just good enough technology. Is good enough. So, again, Bill Gates and Barry Dill are all of them. They weren't wrong. They believed that. Broadband was going to become.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, okay, sorry. But I guess let me rephrase it. I think there was some camp of people that just weren't excited by the idea of networking computers. Then of the people that wanted to network computers globally, there were people that thought the best way to do it would be in this kind of centralized way with putting a big box by your TV with a big fat pipe and sort of a TV kind of top-down experience controlled by Comcast Disney Microsoft. And then there was sort of this really kind of unlikely alternative, which was this at the time pretty crappy experience in mosaic and homebrew websites and Yahoo. And you talk about this in the book. And I think that was sort of at least, let's say, 93 or 4, probably still the underdog. Certainly. That approach. And the fact that versus AOL and all these other companies, you know, and the fact that that ended up winning, what's the lesson there? It's a very interesting story.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the point being though, that there were plenty of people who just didn't believe in the internet. And then among the people that did,”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they were all planning to get together and make, you know, there was a million plans, a million meetings, and I say in the book, you know, Bill Gates took meetings with all in sundry from Barry Diller to whoever.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be able to build a truly great And I think, as I recall, I joined the industry, and there were sort of all these other kind of green shoes. You saw you were in the industry, you start to see, wait, that person, they're supposed to be a terrible thing, and they're making one of them. Absolutely like Flickr and delicious. And there were all these cool products, but also there were zappos and PayPal and a bunch of other companies were actually still kind of going, and they weren't Google, but they were real businesses. So anyways, let's go through some of the chapters of the book. So I think what's particularly interesting is in the early stage of the internet, there was this kind of, I think one thing people don't realize today is the kind of bottom-up decentralized architecture of the web. There was an alternative to it known as the information superhighway being pushed by companies like, I believe you know better, Comcast, Disney, Microsoft.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you remember the first time you heard how much money Google was making? Because I remember so many people's reaction to that because that was the thing is that everyone had been conditioned to think that while the internet was fun, it was probably a niche and you were never going to be able to build a truly great company on top of it. And then all of a sudden, because they kept it secret for so long, I remember people's reactions to just their jaws dropping.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every It's hard to describe to people who didn't live through it how the internet looked 2001 to, let's say, four, like pre-Google IPO, I guess. And you talk about that in the book before people realized. And it was clear people, it was an important thing. People would use it, although nothing today didn't have smartphones and everything. It would be more like the singing. You go home, you check your email. It's this nice way to send pictures to your family. So it's clearly a useful thing to 2001-4. But the assumption was it's one of these things like the airline industry or something that'll just never make money, right? It was a cool thing, cool tool. We're using it, but man, was that a bad idea from a business perspective? That was the sentiment. And then Google, I remember Google's sort of, you know, their IPO and then a bunch of other stuff. Do you remember the”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the rebirth. So, like, seeing that maybe that is the more important lesson than individual ideas that don't work, but being in an industry that is prone to occasionally on a cycle, everything's going to blow up. And so how do you and your company and your idea survive that sort of a cycle?”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's also there's a built in fun narrative there, which is you have the web going mainstream, and so you have this sort of like Cambrian explosion of technology and companies, and then the asteroid hits and the dinosaurs are dead.”
2022-03-10 · a16z Podcast · How the Internet Happened · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source