Benedict Evans
108 statements across 35 episodes · 41 bullish · 22 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Benedict Evans · said 13 times in 12 episodes since 2018 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Benedict Evans's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Sonal Chokshi (5), Steven Sinofsky (2), Chris Dixon (2), Steve McDermott (1), Russ Roberts (1), Michael Copeland (1), Erik Torenberg (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2019 10 mentions in 9 episodes 1 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Capitalizing on an Autonomous Vehicle Future
- a16z Podcast | Building Crypto, from Vision to Reality
- a16z Podcast | When Is VR's iPhone Moment?
- a16z Podcast | Adjusting to Trade... and Innovation
- a16z Podcast | Software Programs the World
- a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
- a16z Podcast | Making the Most of the Data That Matters
- a16z Podcast | On Recent IPOs and Comparing Private vs. Public Valuations
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2019 →
Everything said about Benedict Evans, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Evans: Over four billion adults will own smartphones by 2020
“By the end of this decade, we'll probably go to three quarters of the population being online. Out of five billion adults on Earth, four billion, or over four billion, will have mobile, four billion will have smartphones, and PCs, and consumer PCs in particula…”
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Evans: Mobile represents a 10x economic opportunity over PCs by 2020
“So there are two or three times more smartphones and PCs by 20 20, but you need to multiply those smartphones because they're personal and they're taken everywhere and they're frictionless and they have sensors and cameras and payments and all these other thin…”
Jul 15, 2017
Evans: Technology deployment evolves through three distinct phases
“There tend to be three phases of technology deployment. There are companies that make technology, and that's the companies that you've seen today, that you'll see later on, the companies that we invest in, that everybody in this part of the world builds. Then …”
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Evans: Mobile makes technology a universal product for the first time
“I think the first, and really the most important, is the sense that mobile is really making technology a universal product. That is to say, we sold mainframes to big companies, and we sold PCs to middle class families, and we sold technology in one way or anot…”
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Evans: Technology is outgrowing the traditional tech industry
“Software is kind of outgrowing the tech and technology is outgrowing the tech industry. Because technology is no longer selling technology as technology to people who are writing a check for it, while the people are using technology to build things that are no…”
Jul 15, 2017
Dec 5, 2017 bullish
Evans: Autonomous vehicles will trigger societal changes comparable to mass car adoption
“There's an old saying that it was easy to predict mass car ownership, but hard to predict Walmart. That's kind of the change of, the scale of change that happened from horses. We'll expect to see a sort of a similar scale of change happening from automating ca…”
Dec 5, 2017 positive
Evans Compares Maturity of AI, Crypto, Mixed Reality, and Autonomy
“For autonomy, we are still very much down in the muddy hole in the ground, digging foundations. Mixed reality is just sort of moving out of that to the point that you can throw the frame up. For cryptocurrency, the frame has gone up. We're just trying to work …”
Nov 16, 2018 positive
Nov 16, 2018 neutral
Dec 21, 2018 bullish
Dixon: Smartphone users will hit 5 billion as hardware drops to $3
“You can get a 15 dollar Android phone now. That will come down. You'll be able to get a three dollar phone. It'll probably be like Benedict Evans, who works with us, comes up, he does all these studies on this. It'll be, there'll be something, there's like thr…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Benedict Evans: Modern mobile app stores are like Yahoo in 1995
“When you look at an app store today, it's like looking at Yahoo in 95. You know, you can browse a million apps. You could browse a 100,000 websites, but it doesn't scale. And there's no way for you to find the right things that you want to use on that device.”
Jan 2, 2019
Benedict Evans: Desktop web dominated because downloading apps was too difficult
“The reason that we only had the web on the desktop internet was because it was impossibly difficult to do anything else, and you had to have this incredibly strong selling point to get somebody to actually go and download an application.”
Jan 2, 2019
Benedict Evans: On smartphones, the device itself is the platform
“The smartphone itself becomes a social platform, whereas Facebook, you know, whereas, you know, on the desktop you had the browser, and then inside the browser you had Facebook, and then inside Facebook you had a social platform, whereas on a smartphone that's…”
Jan 2, 2019
Benedict Evans: Installing a smartphone app won't mean downloading code within five years
“If I was to say I installed an app on my Android smartphone in five years, I don't really know what that would mean. You know, what would install mean? You know, what would app actually mean? What would Android mean? And so there's that question. Yeah, exactly…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Desktop computers are now only necessary for hardcore video editing
“And that line has kind of moved steadily of the stuff that you actually needed a desktop for. It shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. And now it's really only, like, hardcore video editing or something you need an enormous screen for.”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Amazon treats TV content and devices as e-commerce loss leaders
“In the US, that's not really the point at all. You know, it's just Amazon, Amazon video, Netflix video, whatever, get them on the device and get them to buy groceries from us, get them to buy diapers from us, get them to buy headphones from us, and the TV is t…”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: BBC iPlayer peak streaming lags traditional TV 750K to 25M
“Peak viewing for iPlayer which is basically all the BBC's content is, like, 750,000 streams, and peak TV viewing is, like, twenty-five million, and the peak, the TV viewing isn't going down, and the iPlay viewing is, well, it's kind of going up a bit, but it a…”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: TV has replaced music as Big Tech's ecosystem battleground
“Music was an ecosystem battleground, and it's turned into a checkbox commodity feature that you throw into any new product as like something you have to have. You know, you're launching a phone, you're launching this, you're launching, you've got to have a pho…”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Content and monetization models—not tech—are TV's true lock
“There's always this sort of misperception that you can turn up with technology and disrupt it, but actually the point of Netflix and the reason why the existing model is so strong is it's actually, no, it's the content. That's the lock on all of this stuff, an…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Benedict Evans: Consumer PCs were historically used for casual tasks
“The idea that there's something wrong with a tablet because people spend most of their time playing games and looking at Facebook and doing email. Well, what did you think consumer PCs were used for the last 15 years? Well, and, of course, they weren't writing…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Benedict Evans: Consumers will converge on owning two main device screens
“You're just going to have this endless proliferation of screens, and people will have two, probably. They'll have one that they put in their pocket and carry everywhere. They will have, they may or may not have a much bigger one that allows them to do more stu…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple's 40% US market share forces bank and merchant alignment
“And because of the market scale that Apple has uniquely kind of in the USA with 40% of smartphones, They could then go to all the banks and all the retailers and say, this is all going to work, and let's all just, you know, get behind and push, which is kind o…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple operates like a club funded by biannual hardware upgrades
“You can describe Apple as a sort of club where the price of membership is buying a new box every two years, and the benefits of being a member of the club keep expanding in terms of all these sort of incremental services around the edges.”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans argues Uber and Airbnb are not fundamentally tech companies
“And the interesting thing that is starting to happen with computing and with software now is it's pushing out of the technology industry. And so when you have, you know, when you have mobile everywhere, when you have payments being pulled in, when you look at …”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans says new technologies are initially forced into old workflows
“What first of all happens is that the new thing has to fit the existing way of doing it. And you say you torture it and kind of cripple it and you make it fit what you did before. And then over time, people come in and this is where the kind of the transformat…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Evans argues high-volume text entry is a narrow fraction of global work
“The first is to say, well, I enter high volumes of text, or I do this precision work with a detail work with a mouse. You can't do that on a smartphone or a keyboard, therefore it's useless. And the answer is, yes, but most people don't actually do that. That'…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: 4 to 4.5 billion adults globally will be online
“What's actually happening is that there are five billion adults on Earth, and four to four and a half billion of them will be online, and basically the only people who are not online are the people who are not economically active or who are basically being sho…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Global smartphone adoption will reach 4 billion devices
“And we'll go to four billion. There's about three and a half to four billion people on Earth today who have a mobile phone. There's a lot more SIM cards, but there's three and a half to four billion people on Earth today who have a mobile phone. And that will …”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Automakers will not be disintermediated by software providers
“Car is still basically kind of about driving, at least until we've got self-driving cars, and even then, you know, it's all basically about how you put the bits of metal together. So I don't think I think they're going to be squeezed out in quite the same way,…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Benedict Evans: Messaging app creators fundamentally oppose open standards
“There's a narrative in the industry that says we need a common standard for messaging apps, which, to me, I think, completely misunderstands the motivation of anybody who's building a messaging app. That's the last thing they want.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Smartwatch apps fail when squishing full smartphone apps onto the wrist
“The apps tend to loop, a lot of the apps remind me of, like, using a J-Me feature phone app in 2006, where, like, you'd squashed way too much stuff down onto that screen, and I think the stuff that really works is when it's just one thing that's almost, like, …”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Seed round volume grew 7x but remains a fraction of VC
“So one of the numbers we came out with is that the number of one to two million dollar rounds has gone up by over seven times in the last decade, but actually the amount of money has gone up much less. So it's still only about a billion dollars in 2014 went in…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Sovereign wealth funds ordered 3x IPO free float in dot-com bubble
“I remember floating a company for which a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund put in an order for the whole of the free float with us and each of the two other banks on the deal, so they ordered three times the entire number of shares on the offer, and I reme…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Startup failure costs $1M today versus $40M in 2000
“In 2000, if that failed, that was 50 to a hundred people, and 20, 30, forty million dollars gone. Today, exactly the same product. Is a hundred grand, 500 grand, a million dollars, three, four, five people who are out trying to get a good job at Google and Fac…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Outsiders cannot evaluate $1B private valuations without financial disclosures
“But if a company does a private round, Add a valuation of a billion dollars. You don't know what any of the financials look like. And so it's too easy sitting on the outside to say, well, that's a good run, but that's a bad number. You're actually, to be corre…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Simplified EV manufacturing will lower entry barriers for tech companies
“And so a little bit like what happened with PCs or smartphones 10 years and 20 years ago you move to a point that it may be easier for people who are not in the car business to be in the car business, because the amount of stuff that you have to make, how that…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Self-driving cars will reshape urban real estate and city layouts
“What self-driving does is it transforms the layout of the city because things like parking and gas stations and strip malls and the kind of the whole layout of the retail and commercial real estate starts to change because it's all built around parking as much…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Self-driving car insurance will cost half as much due to safety
“And those cars don't have a driver, and the insurance probably costs half as much because self-driving cars don't have accidents in the same way, because the error rate will be lower, and so the price of those self-driving, of those on-demand services will be …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Styluses lack mass consumer appeal because most people cannot draw
“I'm pretty skeptical about the kind of the broad value of styluses, styli, I think. I mean, people always show you drawing, and people creating beautiful illustrations, and I think, fine, what about the other Seven billion people on earth you can't draw.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple controls two-thirds to three-quarters of online tablet usage
“And then there is a market for like The post-PC replacement, which is what Apple and Samsung and everybody else is trying to play in, and Apple has like three-thirds, two-quarters has like two-quarters to two-thirds of that, and if you look at all the usage st…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Mobile OS platforms integrate services much deeper than PC OSs
“Unlike, say, a web browser on a, either a Windows or a Mac, where the web browser was the platform and the Windows or the Mac computer wasn't really where you were building internet services. Whereas on a smartphone, not only are you building in the web browse…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Benedict Evans: Global active smartphones will reach 5 to 6 billion
“Almost all of those will become smartphones in the next couple of years, or well over a billion are now, and so we'll go to two billion smartphones if you add in tablets, maybe two and a half, as opposed to three hundred million PCs, And we'll go to five to si…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Stable smartphone platforms enable a Cambrian explosion of innovation
“So you've got this kind of Cambrian explosion of innovation on top of the smartphone now that that's become like a relatively solid platform where you kind of know what you're dealing with and all these things have become possible.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Flip Video failed because smartphone camera capabilities rapidly caught up
“It was the little handheld camera just at the point that camera tech had become commoditized, but not at the point that you could get a good one into a smartphone, and so there was a window of like two years where it took better pictures than you got on, and t…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Benedict Evans: Smartphone supply chain components power most consumer electronics at CES
“The thing that you see, the sort of, the thing that grounds everything, is that this is kind of all about the smartphone supply chain. I mean, not, you know, there's a few things like TVs and so on that aren't, but a huge proportion of what you see is basicall…”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Shenzhen hardware manufacturing functions like open-source software
“In a funny kind of way, you could almost, it's kind of an imperfect analogy, but you can also Almost argue that like the user experience and the injection molded plastic and so on has become software. That is to say in a kind of, there's a sort of analogy in h…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Evans: Creating an app store inside Messenger just shifts discovery problems
“It's like, problem, the app store has two million things in it. Solution, create an app store inside Messenger. Problem, the Messenger app store has two million things inside it. Like, if you haven't actually done something, you have to do some other thing. Al…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Evans: 90% of enterprise PC users do not need desktop PCs
“There's a sort of a core part of the PC market that actually needs to be on a PC, because you're running Excel, or you're running Photoshop, or AutoCAD. And the other 90% of it actually doesn't need to be on a PC. It can be on a Chromebook, or it can be on som…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Chromebooks realize Larry Ellison's 1990s Network Computer vision
“To me, a Chromebook is exactly what Larry Elson was trying to do 20 years ago. I mean, technically the architecture might be different. It's exactly the same thing. It's a web browser that runs client, that runs applications over the network.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Tech companies pursue voice platforms due to smartphone platform envy
“The second thing is that anyone who isn't Apple or Google has major platform envy, and they want to find a way of going around that, not being, worrying about Apple or Google cutting them off at the platform level on the smartphone.”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Big tech product launches often reflect bureaucracy, not strategy
“Is, particularly when you look at kind of a super big company that's got lots of stuff going on, is there are some things that are actually, this is the board level fundamental strategy of what they think is crucial to the existence of the company in the next …”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Auto and electronics supply chains will reorient to EVs in 5–10 years
“It seems pretty clear to me that on a, like a five or 10 year view, and bear in mind cars are on a five to 10 year replacement cycle, so it doesn't have to happen that quickly there will, the entire car supply chain will have reoriented around electric, and ev…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Feb 26, 2019 bullish
Feb 26, 2019 bullish
Feb 26, 2019 negative
Apr 1, 2019 neutral
Jul 25, 2025 neutral
Dec 12, 2025 positive
Dec 12, 2025 bearish
Evans: Current AI cannot replace humans outside tightly constrained guardrails
“The stuff we have now is not a replacement for an actual person outside of some very narrow and very tightly constrained guardrails, which is why, you know, Demis' point that it's absurd to say that we have PhD level capabilities now.”
Dec 12, 2025 neutral
Dec 12, 2025 negative
Evans: Zuckerberg's plan to resell excess AI capacity is flawed
“I saw a slightly strange quote from Mark Zuckerberg saying, well, if it turns out that we've over invested, we can just resell the capacity. And I thought, let me just like stop you there, Mark, because if it turns out that you can't use your capacity, everybo…”
Dec 12, 2025
Dec 12, 2025 bearish
Evans: The AI market will inevitably form a financial bubble
“Well, deterministically, very new, very, very big, very, very exciting, world-changing things tend to lead to bubbles. And you, I don't think anybody would dispute that you can see some bubbly behavior now, and, you know, you can argue about what kind of bubbl…”
Dec 12, 2025 neutral
Dec 12, 2025
Evans: AI lacks theoretical models needed to predict capability limits
“But we don't know the physical limits of this technology, because we don't really have a good theoretical understanding of why it works so well. Nor, indeed, do we have a good theoretical understanding of what human intelligence is. And so we don't know how mu…”
Jun 8, 2026 neutral
Evans: Internet distribution shift devastated newspapers but left movie studios unchanged
“Like, if we'd been back in the late nineties and we'd said, you know, internet will destroy the value of physical distribution, it turned out that meant completely different things for newspapers and movie studios. Like, newspapers got completely screwed by th…”
Jun 8, 2026
Jun 8, 2026 positive
Evans: AI integration is driving ad revenue gains at Google and Meta
“Which is, of course, why you see the ad numbers and the, you know, the conversion rates shooting up in the, every quarter from Google and Facebook. Because they're rolling all of this into their ad systems, and their recommendation engines, and their predictio…”
Jun 8, 2026 bearish
Jun 8, 2026
Evans: Breakthrough tech adoption creates new paradigms rather than simple automation
“Whenever you get a new technology, you start by doing the old thing, but more. More spreadsheets. More PowerPoints. More email. Better email. But the important stuff is not doing the old thing, but more. It's doing something new that you couldn't have done wit…”
Jun 8, 2026 neutral
Jun 8, 2026 neutral
Jun 8, 2026 bearish
Evans: Foundation AI models are commodities and low-level infrastructure
“The models are kind of diff commodities, and the chatbot isn't the right UI or the right product, and the companies aren't going to be able to build all of that stuff themselves, so therefore they're low-level infrastructure.”