YouSaid · the spoken record

Fred Wilson

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88
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2018-09-24
most recent
2018-09-24
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1
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  1. “I think winning the hearts and minds of developers is really hard when you've got an incumbent. And it's like the standard. Like every developer knows how to build on AWS. So if you're starting a company, where are you going to build it on? You're probably building on AWS. 90% of the companies, maybe 95% of the companies we back are built on AWS. But once you're an established company and you can think about maybe moving from one to another, I do think that there'll be three players in that market.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “They really good infrastructure. And they may care that, for example, Google seems to have an advantage on their TPUs, their AI chips, all the kind of bells and whistles and fancy technology they have, which of course they will have.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “But there's a second kind of enterprise customer. There's the truly legacy enterprise customers who are, I think you're right, it's a very high touch white glove kind of thing. Then there's the new enterprise companies, the Spotify's of the world, right? Like Spotify is going to either be on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. But Spotify might not be high touch. They may just want really good infrastructure.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The data I've heard is Microsoft has been making more progress because they're used to, because exactly that is, I mean, Microsoft fundamentally is an enterprise company today, right? And they're very, very good at sort of servicing these large corporate clients. And then they also have these, as I understand it, these sort of like they tie everything together. It's effectively a new kind of bundling, right? You already have office, you have all this other stuff. But there's a second.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think the thing I hear from Google is the challenge is just the sort of the high touch concierge enterprise kind of model, which those companies, you know, whatever, the citibanks of the world expect is just not Something they're used to, although now they have dying green, and that I think they love. So maybe”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think incumbents, I think Google's gonna take some shared, I feel like what Google's doing is they're going top down into their market. They're going to some of AWS's biggest customers and they're saying, you know, we've got some better tech, maybe they do, maybe they don't. We'll do it for less and we'll care about you where they don't. They're taking share. But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market. Google has 30% of the market and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's going to be a three-player game in that business. And that's good.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Like the idea of introducing text messaging into your app, people are like, what's the big deal about having to be able to text natively from an app? But you think about it. And so many little things, but they're big things are enabled by an app being able to text you, like with a two-factor code or your car's arriving or whatever. And to do that before Twilio was hard. And now it's like five lines of code.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Just a whole modern thing, and as a developer, I think the whole concept of developer experience, like really thinking through. I think obviously you were an investor in Twilio. One of their big focuses was kind of the time to delight or something or time to hello world of just like immediately getting in there.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Cloud infrastructure or apps, SaaS? I'm thinking the infrastructure. It's pretty amazing how I'm having the fresh code base, having the fresh attitude, the different perspective. You can just, you can kind of...”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Okay, so going back to what's happening today then, right? So Kind of the big, I mean, I think there's multiple layers here, right? So there's kind of the big core tech trends. I don't know if you agree, but I think it's kind of AI, kind of a proliferation of new kind of computing devices.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Right. But that ultimately caused them to have to sell to Google because they concluded that they couldn't continue to play the game that way, which was the right way to play the game. As an independent company. They needed somebody who could fight the content owners.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's the key difference. I think I was reading this history. I think it was Vimeo and a few of the competitors and they had just a whole different set of financial constraints and couldn't, and also frankly, the view towards copyright. I think YouTube took a more laissez-faire view.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Right. But broadband, I think, was the main thing. But everybody had that opportunity, right? Everybody who was trying to do YouTube at that time was benefiting from broadband. So there were a couple things that YouTube did that others didn't do. And I think the embeddable player was maybe the move that differentiated them from everybody else and just maybe the timing. Plus, they had a lot of venture capital money behind them, so they could spend money. Sometimes that's the key difference.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That was genius. Yeah, before that, remember it was like heavy.com and these things, and they were really like, there's a whole concept before that was destination and that was business model. Part of it was a business model in addition to your earlier point, right? Because the thought was you need to get eyeballs on your page, stickiness, these concepts, which prevented people from encouraging Like the whole idea of embedding one school of thought would have been letting people embed YouTube. Well, how do you make money? How do you do this, right? But that was one of the very insightful things the YouTube creators did.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I also think we needed, I think the two big moves that made YouTube successful, whereas all the people who tried YouTube before YouTube were broadband, that's like 80 to 90% of it, and also social sharing. So the idea that you could take a YouTube video and embed it on your MySpace page, or even just send somebody like a URL and boom, they hit it and they could watch something. The idea that everybody was going to go somewhere to watch something, what's social and social sharing, it blew that idea up. Now all of a sudden, the embeddable YouTube player, that was genius.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You know, it's broadband. You needed the infrastructure, right? I mean, I think it was you to 2005, I think. That was kind of the moment when broadband really tipped. And you could plausibly have, right? I mean,”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But he had all the right ideas All the ideas that happen at WebVans, Instacart, all of them, I had this board game I still have it somewhere. It was called Dot Bomb. Right. And it was like making fun of all the terrible ideas. I blogged about this once. And it was like this joke game about all the stupid ideas in the 90s. And it's literally like every unicorn hot company today. It was like internet money, you know, grocery delivery.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's funny because I talk to people now who I think weren't around during the early internet and a lot of people will say, I hear it a lot that, well, the internet came along by 94 had all these killer apps and was incredibly, I think one fun exercise is to go watch movies from the 90s as a way to kind of go back and look at it. And first of all, the interesting thing, right, the internet just doesn't exist. There's no mobile phones every once in a while someone will like, it's like this ritual. They'll say, I'm going to go online. And like the very phrase, like go online, kind of is this kind of archaic phrase that is from that era, right? And it's, and then like there's beeping and there's this and that and then there's like you've got mail and they get on and they do this thing and then they get off and like it's this thing and it's this thing you do for 10 minutes. But it almost, if you actually watch movies from the 90s, like the internet, even that doesn't happen, right? Except for like hackers or a couple of like specialty movies or something, right? And it was essentially, you know, I mean, it was like literally waiting for an image to load and like innovations of the”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I mean, I think what Google did is that they made advertising the business model for applications, right? Like my mail and my browsing and my searching is all supported by advertising. Like Microsoft would have made me pay for that, right? They would have said, you're going to pay for Explorer, you're going to pay for Outlook, and that's how we're going to monetize it. Google comes along and says, no, that's an ad product. And so that's what's disruptive is like, that's just, everything changes when you change the business model. It's like all of a sudden, you know, your strengths become your weaknesses. And that's what allows a lot of new entrants to come in.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think that's right. But yet, you know, and this is why we're so interested in crypto, I think crypto is the one innovation out there that feels highly disruptive because it's a real change in business model. It's not just a technological change. It's a fundamental change in business model. You're not monetizing with ads. You're not monetizing with subscriptions. You're monetizing with the underlying token. It's like orthogonal to all of the...”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And so when you say there isn't a lot of innovation, I think what we're to clarify, there's a lot of clever inventions happening. There's AI, I think of it as like AI, new computing platforms, crypto, et cetera. But there's a lot of that happening, but a lot of it feels sustaining, as like Clay Christensen would say, not disruptive, right? So it will reinforce the current industry structure, not change it.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Like, why doesn't that happen today? I don't get it. I don't understand why the map interface hasn't become the default interface for dispatch of anything, whether it's a scooter or a car or a bike or whatever. Maybe it's just like it's going to take some time. Maybe that stuff doesn't happen overnight. That's where I want to do the dispatch. So even that, I think, you know, the mobile OSs have the opportunity to suck that functionality in. And that is one thing that's going on a lot right now is that the functionality is getting sucked more and more into the operating systems and the proprietary apps that these big companies have built on top of those operating systems.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Maybe what Google wants to do longer term, one would think, with their self driving car effort and their maps. You've got to but you use Google Maps, you open it up, you've got a button, get a car, right?”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “allowed for Snapchat and even that I've always thought that the maps layer could commoditize the entire ride sharing business hasn't right like Uber and Lyft and a bunch of other companies a bunch of companies in Asia dominate that business but I don't understand why the map on your phone whether it's an iPhone or an Android phone isn't the ride sharing application and then all of these ride sharing networks are just me”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “One thing that mobile did, you know, you take the ride hailing as an example, it did enable new behaviors, which allowed for startup opportunities that I think of it as every new computing platform has new capabilities. And generally, startups will exploit the uniquely new capabilities and incumbents may or may not successfully port over to the platform. In the case of mobile, they did, but it also unlocked, you know, so you had the intimacy of the camera allowed for Snapchat and even”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I forget why I read this. This data is now four or five years old, but if you look at the top 100 mobile apps and you look at what the top 100 websites were before the iPhone came out, it's not a very different list, right? So, you know, those companies, Facebook, I think, is the perfect example of this, saw that the mobile phone and mobile apps could potentially disrupt them. They pivoted their focus to get there and they got there. And the net of it is that they're in a stronger position than ever. So I don't think that a lot of the innovation is currently powering a lot of disruption.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Disruption was a lot of innovation, right? Right, but a lot of that's accruing to AI is a really good example, right? So, you know, if you look at the big tech companies, I don't think that they were disrupted very much by the shift from web to mobile, and I don't think they're going to be disrupted very much by the adoption of AI powered.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, if you say innovation or disruption? Disruption is a better one. I think it was a lot of innovation, right? I mean, there's great stuff happening in AI and self-driving cars. Right. Right. But a lot of that's accruing to. AI is a really good example”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So we'll get more and more of what we interface with in business, in our personal life, whatever, that's going to be software as opposed to hardware. And I just think that that makes the total available market of this technological shift way, way, way larger. I think we're in a moment in time where it feels like there's not a lot of innovation. And I will admit that the past maybe four or five.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Well, and it has implications. So I remember reading a book about Ford and the whole, you know, the big problem was they broke down all the time. And so the big innovation was service centers everywhere. And so this change in being able to update over the air also changes, for example, the service model and therefore the kind of almost the industry structure potentially.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, I mean, even the greatest thing about Tesla is the over-the-air software upgrade. It's like literally get in the car and all of a sudden I got a new upgrade and there's new software all of a sudden.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So I think certainly the Total economic value that will be unlocked with the software revolution should be at least one, maybe two, maybe three orders of magnitude bigger than what we saw with manufacturing, automotive for the reasons you describe. I just think that if everything, if we can get everything into software, then just imagine what the possibilities are, right?”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And our software base and can upgrade themselves. And so I guess what I would say is I wonder if software, because it's fundamentally a software net, I mean, of course, at the bottom level, it's copper and other, you know, fiber and other things and radio waves. But the heart of it is software. And I just wonder if software has, my view is software has so many more degrees of freedom. It has so much more kind of plasticity, ability to adapt, ability to evolve that maybe unlike the car and the TV that the core itself will also dramatically change and not just the apps around it.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “The physical infrastructure, and then maybe you upgrade color or HD or something, but it's fundamentally fixed, right? It's fundamentally, once you've built the core, it's fundamentally done, and then you just build around it, right? The internet, as of course know, is deliberately designed to be a very lightweight protocol where all of the intelligence lies at the nodes and the servers.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Let me give you maybe a more optimistic view, which is, so one thing I went to Carlotta Perez, and I think it's a brilliant theory and explains a lot of history. But I wonder if software is different than hardware. And let me try to explain that. So you build a car, you know, 1900-ish, you build cars, you have Ford and GM, et cetera. They get better, but fundamentally the car has stayed mostly the same, obviously gotten better, but the same basic function, same basic kind of design. And then all the action from, I don't know, 19, probably what, 30 to today moved to kind of the quote-unquote app layer, right? It was interstate highway system and suburbs and shopping centers and trucking systems. And then TV, right? So TV, you build the TV, you have the radio, you build.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “On for the past 25 or 30 years, and if we could maybe broaden out what the protocols are to a point where we could have a much more open and level playing field, we might actually have a lot more ways to go. So that's me speaking optimistically about where we are.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And so if that's the case, it's 2018. Do we have 82 more years to go? And yet, like we're feeling like it's already a mature sector, right? We're looking at our saying Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple. They have these massive entrenched platforms and it's becoming really, really hard to compete with them. How could we have another 50, 60, 70 years to go? And I think going back to something that Mark Andreessen said, you know, in the original design of the Internet and the World Wide Web, we didn't necessarily get it all right. And so what we have now in terms of like these entrenched platforms is maybe a function of what the spec was that we've been building.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So, you know, I think it's really important to have a framework. And as a lot of people who follow me and USV know, we're really big fans of Carlotta Perez. And if you look at the big technological shifts that have happened over the past 200, 300 years, what you see is that many of them last for kind of a century, right? Automotive or more broadly speaking, industrial or manufacturing-based businesses were kind of the technological revolution of the 20th century. And even though internet and tech kind of emerged very powerfully in the 80s and 90s, I think we might argue that internet and tech really is the technological revolution of the century we're in now.”

    2018-09-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet 'Disruption' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source