Benedict Evans
Independent Technology Analyst. On 5 shows, 158 appearances, plus 3 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
analystauthorinvestorhost@benedictevans ↗LinkedIn ↗ben-evans.com ↗
Benedict Evans is an independent analyst known for his annual macro presentations and tech industry newsletter. He previously served as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-hosts Another Podcast.
5shows
158appearances
2,005statements
536resolved
385supported
51contradicted
72%fully supported
16said about them ↓ Everything Benedict Evans said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Evans: VR headsets will not replace smartphones as primary computing platforms
“You're not going to wear a headset, no matter how light and cheap it is, all day outdoors. I would not have worn it walking here, even if it weighed a hundred grams and had completely perfect pass-through. Therefore, it can't replace your phone. Therefore, we …”
Evans: Open-source clones of commercial products never succeed
“Well, so I was looking at, I looked at Metaverse, sorry, at Fediverse, and saw, this looks like an open source claim of Twitter, and open source claims of commercial products never work. It's the only people who use them are people who care that it's open sour…”
Twitter needed an 80% to 90% staff reduction and cultural reset
“And so it needed, like, a total cultural reset, and you needed to, like, fire 80 or 90% of the people and then hire back. So that instead of having, it had well over 10,000 people plus, plus contractors. And it's gone down to a thousand or something, and maybe…”
Evans: Musk's management of Twitter has been a series of self-inflicted wounds
“But since then, we've just had like one massive self-infected wound after another. Like he doesn't have, he's shot himself in the feed so many times, whether that's banning external links, like banning people, blocking people. And like, yes, the content modera…”
Evans: Twitter is a failure compared to Meta's multi-billion user apps
“It's an amazing success. Like, no, it fucking isn't. It's got two hundred fifty million users. Each has, like, Meta's got three or even four products that have each got three billion users. It's a failure.”
Elon Musk lacks an intuitive understanding of how social networks work
“Like on past form, you know, Elon is just going to keep doing this because he clearly just hasn't, doesn't have any understanding or any kind of intuitive sense of how social networks work. And he doesn't understand that he, every time he does these things, he…”
Musk's controversial tweets destroy half a billion dollars in value each
“When you do that, you just, that, that, that, that tweet cost you half a billion dollars. Every time you do that, that's another half billion dollars gone. Like, why do you do that? It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.”
Evans: Developers will have little reason to build for Meta Quest
“I feel very sorry for Meta because they spent, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars on their product that, you know, no one's really, only a couple of million people are really using and doesn't have traction. And after this, why on earth would y…”
Evans: Generative AI is going to demolish the porn industry
“It's also going to happen to porn. It's just going to demolish the porn industry. Because again, there's vast amounts of training data.”
Evans: Near-zero AI error rates render semantic understanding questions practically irrelevant
“And as the error rate goes down, you get this philosophical conversation, which is what gets you to AI risk, where people are saying, look, you throw another hundred X more compute and 200 X more data at it, and the error rate goes to 90 X percent, 99.98%.
At…”
Evans: DOJ e-books lawsuit effectively protected Amazon's monopoly
“The DOJ basically goes to court in order to protect the position of a monopolist. Now that was actually what happened. What they said they were, or thought they were doing, was protecting low consumer prices, which was also what was happening. But the low cons…”
Evans: Netflix is a TV company, while YouTube actually disrupts television
“Netflix is a TV company, not a tech company, because all the questions that it poses, the TV industry questions, and it hasn't actually changed what a TV show is. It's just bought more of them and made more of them. Mr. Beast clearly is not a TV show. It's som…”
Sequoia Was an Unsophisticated Investor Duped by FTX
“FTX was selling Wall Street to non-Wall Street people. In this case, it's an, it's a funny, you could almost say it's an increase at Sequoia with the unsophisticated investors who got taken to the cleaners by some clown from hedge fund land.”
Bitcoin and Ethereum Currently Lack Real Utility
“At the moment we don't really have utility for them other than people building stuff that we hope we'll be able to do stuff with at some point in the future.”
Evans: Policy papers cannot control AI because models are open source
“And indeed the whole problem I had with the whole concept of AI safety and AI ethics was like, this stuff is all fundamentally open source. So aren't five companies that can do this. Anybody will be able to do this. So you're not going to be able to sit and wr…”
Evans: Netflix using algorithms to commission shows is "all bullshit"
“So all this stuff I read about how Netflix is using algorithms and software and artificial intelligence to work out what shows to commission, it's all bullshit. You're not paying somebody twenty million dollars a year if you've got a machine that tells you wha…”
Evans: Requiring Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links is ludicrous
“Completely ludicrous idea that Google and Facebook should somehow pay newspaper companies to link to that.”
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Evans: Nest and Within probably would have failed without Big Tech buyouts
“The practical effect would probably be that Nest would have gone out of business. Within would probably have gone out of business.”
Evans: FTC Chair Lina Khan falsely claimed Amazon sold below cost
“Basically she claimed Amazon was losing money, which was This wasn't true. Or she claimed Amazon was selling below cost, which wasn't true.”
Evans: Vast majority of platform moderation decisions are universally agreed upon
“The vast majority of the decisions are not the lab leak theory from China or Hunter Biden's laptop. They're not things where people disagree. They are, you know, things where literally everybody who thinks content moderation is bad would look at that and go, o…”
Evans: Decentralized social networks with multiple clients are an illusion
“And so this idea, which is also a web three idea, which is that you could sort of have a decentralized social network and have lots of different clients all plugging onto the same database is kind of an illusion because what's going into the database is what t…”
Evans: Open source and Linux failed completely as consumer products
“So Linux failed completely. As a consumer product, open source failed completely at creating consumer products.”
Evans: Tesla's energy business is worthless in software vs. cars debate
“The pair of that, of course, is Tesla, where, you know, half the questions are car industry questions, and half of them are software questions, and indeed, you know, the argument about Tesla is The Tesla stock is the bulls think it's a software company and the…”
The other half of the tape: Benedict Evans's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 14 times in 13 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 5Steven Sinofsky 2Chris Dixon 2Steve McDermott 1Sridhar Ramaswamy 1Russ Roberts 1Michael Copeland 1Erik Torenberg 1
Statements about Benedict Evans, by other people (2)
Torenberg: Benedict Evans Called a16z a Media Firm Monetizing via VC
“Benedict Evans once called A, 16 Z a media company that monetizes via VC.”
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…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 13
the MAD Podcast 1
2025 3 mentions in 3 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 →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Benedict's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 ANOTHER PODCASTLEDGER | Independent Technology Analysthost | 99 | 1,261 | 75% 255/341 | full record on Another Podcast → |
| a16zLEDGER | Independent Technology Analyst | 54 +3 | 611 | 66% 110/167 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| MADLEDGER | Independent Technology Analyst | 3 | 82 | 65% 11/17 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Independent Technology Analyst | 1 | 28 | 100% 6/6 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Independent Technology Analyst | 1 | 23 | 60% 3/5 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |