Opinion
Sonal Chokshi: American atheists treat tech icons like religious subjects
“Pretty much everyone in the U.S. Who thinks they're an atheist is actually completely religious, but for something different, like Steve Jobs, or a MacBook Pro, or Star Wars.”
Insight
Network Effects Are One of the Few Remaining Software Moats
“Network effects are One of the few ways we have left for software businesses to have a moat, to create a moat around their business so that competitors can't eat away at their margins.”
Assertion Contradicted
Chokshi: The Biggest Startup Hits Come From First-Time Founders
“If you really think about the biggest outlier hits and successes of the past 10 years, they're actually first-time entrepreneurs with no track record.”
Opinion
Chokshi: Pretending tech workplaces lack hierarchy is disingenuous
“Yeah, I think people often pretend like there is no hierarchy, and I think that's actually very disingenuous. There's clearly, there's a hierarchy.”
Assertion Supported
Chokshi: Microsoft has more GitHub commits than any other company
“The most interesting thing I saw this past week is this stat that Microsoft now has more commits to GitHub than any other company. And can you just think about that for a moment? Like Microsoft on GitHub.”
Opinion
Chokshi: Mainstream media dilutes expertise by relying on third-person reporting
“Media dilutes expertise with third party, third person voice. Yeah. There should always be first person voice for experts.”
Insight
Chokshi: Tech ecosystems require both government support and bottom-up entrepreneurship
“There's never been a really successful case of a top down government mandated or government created eco cluster. Nor has there been a completely purely successful bottoms up community where it's just a startup set of entrepreneurs who are very entrepreneurial …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Chokshi: The rise of DAOs will produce new management literature
“And now as we move into a new wave of DAOs that is just the beginning, we're going to have a whole new body of management leadership.”
Assertion Supported
Chokshi: John Hennessy pioneered the microprocessor architecture used in 99% of devices
“But first, we begin with John's own history as a startup founder, based on pioneering the microprocessor architecture used in 99% of devices today.”
Insight
Chokshi: Human error and psychology are always system breakpoints
“The fundamental breakpoint in any system will always be the human, the error, you know, the psychology of a person and the details related to that.”
Assertion Supported
Chokshi: NPM is the world's largest open source library ecosystem
“And its package manager, NPM, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Falling memory costs will unify storage and compute memory
“With the cost of system memory decreasing, memory for both storage and compute will be the exact same thing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chokshi: Netflix reshapes cultural consumption through on-demand catalog lock-in
“It's already working on some level because you might have a million other movies out there, but you really don't care because you only care about what's in the Netflix catalog because you're Being able to binge watch and get it on demand in the moment. So it's…”
What-if
Chokshi: Restricting early internet commerce would have destroyed modern tech economy
“And if people had said like from the very get go, cause no one predicted the internet would lead to all these different businesses. And to be able to say then like, oh, but we have to proscribe the use of it for commerce. It wouldn't have created this economy …”
Insight
Chokshi: Network effects, not patents, provide defensible moats in software
“In our business and software, obviously there is a complex matrix of patents in some cases where you really need it. But At the end of the day, a lot of the defensibility and moats, we're looking at our network effects.”
Insight
Chokshi: Market Credit Goes to Effective Execution, Not Original Discovery
“What really matters is who took it to market and executed on it well. So it is really interesting that when you think about authorship and the previous models of knowledge that were produced, that it's not necessarily the person who received credit is the pers…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Chokshi: Google Glass will find its primary success in enterprise applications
“Although I think people would argue that, and this is not, we haven't talked about this in great detail, we don't have time to, that Google Glass would probably find its promise in the enterprise, because I know when we were working on that sort of thing back …”
Assertion Partly supported
Sonal Chokshi: Germany published its legal statutes on GitHub
“When in the early days when countries like Germany put their entire code, their laws in GitHub, and people, everyone essentially became an open source contributor.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sonal Chokshi: Productivity compounding from mobile technology has barely begun
“I think there's going to be this compounding. We're actually at the very beginning. Like, when people talk about the mobile phone and this arrival, it's not the end. It's the beginning, and the compounding effect hasn't even begun yet.”
Insight
Chokshi: Legacy companies struggle to become SaaS due to organizational structure
“One of the theses that we've put forth is that it's actually very difficult for a non-software-as-a-service company to actually become a software-as-a-service company because it requires completely re-architecting everything from the ground up, from your sales…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Chokshi: Consumers will book on websites and manage itineraries via bots
“Like when I book my initial plane ticket, I'm probably going to go to a travel website. And then when I have the rest of those interactions about updating my travel and doing all the reservations, I'll do all that within a bot.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chokshi: Startup valuations have grown too large for corporate acquisition strategies
“These big companies, which before could have quickly acquired startups to help them do some of these things, now those companies get too big. They reaches a point where their market cap is too big. We've observed this for them to even consider affording the ab…”
Insight
Chokshi: The best tech companies are founded in crowded markets
“And the best companies were actually started in spaces where it was very crowded.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chokshi: Custom podcast curation is limited to tech early adopters
“Because I don't think people are really custom curating these perfect lists for themselves. I think only tech early adopters are doing that sort of thing.”
