We are very close to every adult on the planet being on the Internet. It took 25 years to get there. [2:35]
[Now that everyone is connected to the Internet] I think things will get very different. I think things will be much more positive. [3:42]
The Internet’s impact on culture is just beginning. A world in which culture is based on the Internet is just at the very start. That is actually happening now. [4:08]
An entrepreneur comes in to pitch an idea and you feel that you should draw a judgment if it is going to work or not. That is something I am leary of doing anymore. The reason for that is every successful technology that I am aware of has an incredible 25 or 50-year backstory to them. You have to go back and excavate because you haven’t heard a lot of the backstory because the previous efforts failed. But if you go back and look there is often a multigenerational run-up. [4:40]
Some of my favorite examples:
RadioShack had a smartphone in 1982.
Videoconferencing goes back to the mid-1960s.
The telegraph was invented in the 1870s and sat on the shelf for 100 years before the Japanese turned it into an industry.
Paris had an optical telegraph network under the city in the 1840s.
[5:22]
[After AI a lot of products just won’t be relevant anymore] There are lots of business apps where you type data into a form and then you run reports against the data. That has been the model of business apps for 50 years. What if that isn’t needed anymore? What if AI has access to all your business records and it just gives you the answer to whatever the question is. You don’t need to go through all the other steps. [9:10]
Google has the consumer version of this. Search has been blue links for 25 years now. Google thinks it should just be the answer. That is what they are trying to do with their voice UIs. That concept might generalize out and then everything gets built out. [9:50]
Voice may be the foundation for AR. You can keep Airpods in your ear all day. You can talk to it all day. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are getting really good and really fast. It may be that we have this constant, ongoing dialogue with a machine just talking into our ear. [11:50]
Software today is massively inefficient. The old adage in tech in the 90s when Andy Grove was running Intel and Bill Gates was running software was: Andy giveth in the form of Moore’s law and Bill taketh away in the form of software bloat. [17:48]
[We see a lot of Uber for X / the following of trends] That is not how the great ideas arrive. They don’t look like that. They look like very specific theories. Not general theories. They tend to be very specific to the details of the market involved. [25:13]
One of the historical precedents for venture capital was how whaling expeditions were funded in the 1600s. You will have a ship that will try to bring back a whale. There was a high failure rate. Only 2/3rds of the ships would come back. They were financed by angel syndicates. Venture capital basically. The term carry —how we get paid—was the percentage of the whale that the ship carried. It was literally a physical carry. [27:44]
Any important company or product takes a decade or more to build. Everything important takes a long time. Long term orientation is absolutely necessary. Long term thinking is really easy if you know the thing is going to work. [30:44]
The best-run companies tend to run multiple experiments against their goals. [33:00]
There is a novel Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez that extrapolates [the advancement] of drones forward. It will keep you up at night. [40:15]
Full video here: Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future
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