The Wisdom Wall, every show

“This is like the great fallacy of enterprise software that you can just sell to the users, and it's like it only ever worked for Slack and one other company. Maybe Notion, but even Notion has capped out.”

“one of the sort of fallacies here is a sort of an appeal to authority, which is, you know, well, that person is an AI scientist, so they must know if this is a threat to world peace. No, they don't. They're an AI scientist. They don't know anything more about, they don't know anything more about world peace than any…”

“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 source, not people who care about the product, for the product.”

“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 a certain point, it doesn't matter if it has, doesn't have…”

“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 the product is. And that's determined by the client, not the…”

“WhatsApp doesn't have an ad model. WhatsApp has massive problems with harmful content. They have massive problems with rumors in India, for example, and people forming mobs and killing each other based on rumors on WhatsApp. They don't have advertising. They don't have an algorithm. So stop fucking telling me it's…”

“for Google, Android is a tactic, and cloud is a strategy, whereas for Apple, the device is a strategy, and the cloud is a tactic. The cloud is a feature of the core strategy, whereas for Google, the device is a feature of the core strategy.”

“there was this whole story, kind of, 1015 years ago in the Valley, that like, Enterprise software will become grassroots. It'll be bottom up, bottom up enterprise, bottom up sales. You won't have to go through the sales process. You won't go to CIO. You won't have to wait. They go through an 18 month sales cycle. The…”

“chip companies didn't capture the value. Um, ISPs didn't capture the value. Mobile network operators didn't capture the value. Windows and iOS did, but they were doing something else.”

“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.”

“these things become competitive necessities, and everybody has to buy it and use it. Um, but the cost saving or the productivity gain that you get from it just kind of gets competed away, so you don't get to charge more for it.”

“And so then you can kind of get into calling those races where, again, it's like being in 1997 and saying, well, is it going to be Excite or Yahoo? And the answer was no, generally.”

“So distribution of an adequate product when the field is basically commodity distribution on brand become a big deal.”

“I don't feel like the reason it's hard to compete with X or Y or Z company is how long it would take you to write the code to replicate the product. It's almost never the problem. It's the problem. The hard part is everything else. It's working out what the product should actually be, and what the code should be doing,…”

“because if you are Meta or Google, You've got this whole other highly profitable business, which now needs to have LLMs inside it, powering all sorts of capabilities and features, and you probably want them to be your LLMs rather than somebody else's. But you may not necessarily need to make money from the LLM by…”

“But if you've got a bunch of use cases where you need the right answer, as opposed to sort of the right answer, then saying that the model is better doesn't mean anything. I mean, literally, it is literally meaningless. What you're telling me is, I asked the model to compile 50 things, and last month it would get 10 of…”

“the chatbot itself is kind of like trying to differentiate a web browser in that you've got an input box and an output box, and how can you make them different if the whole point is that you can type in anything and get anything out.”

“you start from the technology. You don't, you don't, you don't control the product strategy, which is of course how science works, but you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to get built. You know, obviously you've got like Sam and, and, and Dario and so on are like setting that fundamental…”

“Most SaaS companies are database wrappers, where somebody realized that here is this problem, and here is the people who have it, and here is a way of turning it 90 degrees, and this is your insertion point, this is how you build it and take it to market.”

“There are no network effects in building the models yet. There may be in the future, but at the moment we don't know.”

“what that's saying is the head of product isn't setting the product strategy and has no idea what the product is going to be in a month's time. Because there's going to be stuff coming out of the research lab that they don't know about, that the research lab doesn't know about, but they certainly don't know about.…”

“when the technology is basically undifferentiated, the product is undifferentiated, and you've got radically different market shares, that tends to be an unstable situation.”

“There's a recurring delusion throughout the history of software that firstly, people always think there's going to be a general purpose abstraction layer that will just do everything. And secondly, people always think, um, that everyone who doesn't write code will write code. If we just made it a little bit easier,…”

“There's no network effect that we know of yet. And so unlike previous, um, kinds of software platform shift, there's not any Obvious strategy in building the models where you can make yours better than everybody else's by doing that, following that plan. Well, you can hope for a breakthrough that no one else…”

“There's no apparent equivalent in LLMs right now. There's no reason why the LLMs get better because more people use them.”

“For an LLM, variance is bad. Originality is, is, is a lower score.”

“There's this sort of question for Apple around, does this actually change the experience of what a smartphone is, what the ecosystem is? Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted, in the sense that you're going to still, for the time being, you're still going to buy a smartphone? ... You're still going to buy the nice…”

“What Meta and Amazon want to do is to make LLM's commodity info that sold at cost. This is why Meta made it open source, because they want to make it commodity info that sold at cost, and they differentiate on top with Meta stuff, with Facebook, social, Instagram-y stuff, and they want the model itself to be just…”

“given that there's no network effects, or don't, or not yet any network effects in LLMs, that feels very fragile. Like, you know, if you remember, you know, I cannot, you know, remember, like, everyone used Yahoo, and then everyone switched to Google, because it actually was better. Everyone used MySpace, and we did…”

“the only thin, thin GPT wrappers are what you get when you go to chatgpt.com and claude.com and grok and all these others. That's a thin wrapper on a model. Whereas, um, you know, name your vertical enterprise SaaS company. That's not a thin wrapper.”

“the analogy that's been floating around, I think, is, is to, is to compare this with AWS, in the sense that AWS was a sort of an order of magnitude change in how easy you could get a startup out of the door. You didn't need to write all this stuff yourself and buy infrastructure. And so it may be that, like, if nothing…”

“in a sense, like, AWS and Meta are on the same page, and then Meta wants this to be cheap, generic commodity infrastructure that's sold at marginal cost, and they will differentiate on cool Facebooky stuff on top. Um, Amazon want this to be cheap, generic commodity marginal infrastructure, infrastructure that's sold at…”

“There's no viral loop. There's no network effect. There's no reason why you should use the one your friends use. There's no reason this one gets better because everyone else uses it, at least not yet.”

“Just because if you make something much cheaper, people will probably use much more of it up to a point. Although interestingly, there's a debate now as to whether mobile data traffic is actually slowing down. Um, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to charge much more money for it.”

“Every big company's got a trial. No one's really using it very much, or not many people are using it very much. There's a small number of fields where you had this immediate obvious use case, like it's great for coding, it's great for marketing, it's great for brainstorming.”

“this is, you know, classic disruption that the new thing tends to be crap at the stuff that was important for the old thing, but then it does something different that's new. And if you test an LLM by asking it to do complex logic problems or masquerade problems, or do kind of highly specific data retrieval, it's kind…”

“The general web search engine is a natural monopoly because you need a lot of money, and then once you spend the money, no one else can do it. So it's like a water company or phone company.”

“It seems to me like the Occam's razor is, if you can't guarantee it's right, then it's features. It has to be wrapped in something that can manage or control or shape expectations or something around what it is that this is doing, because you can't just use it for anything.”

“ask yourself why it is it's a lot easier to go to a company and say, here's a slide maker, than to go to a company and say, well, look, ChatGPT is just multimodal, so just ask what you want. Tell it the slides you want. No, you want UI. You want product around it.”

“basically every enterprise software company for the sake of argument is unbundling Oracle, Gmail, or Excel.”

“you don't look at this and say, well obviously the solution is that we needed to have a database regulator that makes sure that databases don't have bugs. Um, rather you look at it and say, well, this is an institutional failure. A in Fujitsu in the post office and B in the legal system, not properly testing the…”

“the real Policy problem with TikTok is not that it has personal data, it kind of doesn't really, it's that it's deciding what you see.”

“if you think that you're going to solve this by hiring more women or more black people, you're kind of not understanding what's going on.”

“There's a difference when you do, something can be the same theoretically, just at greatest in principle, but a much greater scale and, and practical and accessible and everything else. And in fact, making something much greater scale and much more accessible, but the same in principle actually can be a difference in…”

“The problem, newspapers problem is not that Google and Facebook have a monopoly. The newspaper's problem is that the newspapers used to have a monopoly and they don't anymore.”

“One of the things that occurred to me is this is a sort of destruction test of the whole thesis, because if basketball doesn't work on this screen, even that, I mean, it's, yes, it's four grand. Yes. It's heavy. If you put the basketball on and after five minutes, you're like, this is shit, then we're done. Yeah. It's…”

“this, this stuff does, yes, this stuff happens for the sake of argument, but it does not happen in three months or three, it takes three years. The deployment for that is going to take, yes, the, the actually turning it into software, um, that's not just ChatGPT.”

“if you make something cheaper and easier and more accessible, then quite often you have more people doing it, not fewer. If suddenly anybody can produce a beautiful, can produce, um, can make a poster with fonts, that doesn't mean you have fewer graphic designers. It means you have more.”

“Whereas with AGI, we have no theoretical model for what AGI actually is, and we also actually don't have a theoretical model for how LLMs work. Other than at a very, very high, high level. So we don't actually know what will happen if we give it three X more data and four X more compute”

“Whereas for AR, it either looks like it's there or it looks, or it doesn't. That's the thesis. And so it has to have that base level. And so Apple is basically saying that all the stuff that's on the market now just isn't worth selling.”

“with a feature phone, internet was one icon on your telephone. Whereas on a smartphone, the telephone is one icon on your, on your computer. So kind of whole thing gets kind of pulled inside out. And that's sort of the AR VR thesis here that Apple has is no metaverse is one of Apple meta's metaverse is one of the 20…”

“this is a sort of a destruction test on VR. If this doesn't make VR Work. Never mind the price. Then that's it. VR's done. ... Like if this doesn't, when this gets to 500 bugs, if it doesn't work, VR is done because this is the device. There is no, there's nothing better that this is the device. So if it doesn't work,…”

“and you could say, well, if that gets fixed, then we've got AGI, but actually I didn't think that's true because one way to fix it might be that it could just say, I don't know. The problem at the moment is it, it might not know and give you make something up, or it might know and make something up. And that's…”

“Um, but in general, machine learning has become a commodity very quickly, um, which is sort of the absurdity of people saying, well, we have to ban face recognition, or you can, you can ban it, but that won't work. Um, cause it's just a commodity technology.”

“And it's not, now they actually are using the content and not sending the traffic to the newspaper. And so that whole newspaper argument that you are using our content goes from being dishonest nonsense to being actually true.”

“I mean, this is, this is kind of, you know, like the kind of the, like the first five minute reaction to GPT, 3.5 is this is a catastrophe for search advertising, which you kind of pull back and think, well, it's already not actually, you know, if I get, I can go to chat GPT and I can say, make me an itinerary for…”

“the open source fallacy should also give people a lot of caution, which is, The difference between what technologies think matters and what users would like and the problems that users have. And, you know, I don't have access to the source code of my phone is not a user problem. I am standing on the street at 10…”

“if I've now looked at millions of pictures of wizards and I draw something, do I have to pay them? Like, no. Um, if I copy your thing, do I have to pay you? Well, yes.”

“you can't just say, well, this is what copyright law says. And this is a derivative work, and that's fair use. That's not really what's, that doesn't, that doesn't map very well to what's happening here. It's kind of like taking live performance rights from the early 19th century and applying that to radio. Well,…”

“If you're worried about a Chinese app that could have access to device on the phone, then you either just ban all Chinese apps, or you try for a systemic, scalable solution across, like, well, you have privacy laws, you have rules that all apps have to follow, you have rules that all companies have to follow. That's…”

“this is effectively a way for Amazon to squeeze more margin. Out of its suppliers, um, as much as it is advertising”

“And clearly you should be more, if you look at it and you say, well, it makes cats, but the cats have four, have three legs. If you say, well, yeah, it can make some text, but the text isn't very good and it's got mistakes in it. You're frankly, you're an idiot. You're not really realizing what the kind of the…”

“Um, but the other side of it is, um, that most of what we were doing remained in three D, in two D. Text is two D. Pictures are two D. Video is two D. Most of what we do is two D. Um, and so the shift in character to move to three D is actually much bigger than the shift. You know, maybe what will happen, but it is a…”

“I don't think the direction of travel of software is bigger screens. I don't think the direction, or more fundamentally, is not about showing you more information. It's not about having more rows in the spreadsheet. It's having less rows in the spreadsheet and not having a spreadsheet and having machine learning do it…”

“Yeah, you're going to reach a point where, like, if you didn't want to be part of Adobe, then you shouldn't have taken the fucking twenty billion dollars. Which was always the problem with WhatsApp. Like, and yes, there were all sorts of things about broken promises and blah, blah, blah, but it's like, if you didn't…”

“The challenge is like, there's no network effect there. It's a budget effect. It's not like Facebook where everyone, it's not that, it's not like Facebook where everyone has to use WhatsApp because everyone's on WhatsApp.”

“in the end, it's still about the TV shows or the books or the music or the clothes. And I think that, that sense, it's a kind of a, kind of a counter argument to the sort of software reach the world thesis.”

“sometimes what happens is that the software is just a commodity, and it's the other part of the product that's the thing. It's, it's, it's the clothes, it's the clothes, or the TV, or the light, that's the thing. The product is no longer technology, the technology is just some, some part buried inside it.”

“with banking, you can just come and be the bank. And from the consumer point of view, it's relatively straightforward as a consumer experience for that to be your whole banking experience. Whereas from healthcare, it can't be because there's all these different things. Like you, as a consumer, you've got different…”

“It's like, you know, if I take a photograph, is the camera now the artist and not me? Well, no, it's me that decided what the picture was, and where to point it, and how to take it, and which of the 2000 pictures you took is, is the one. And, you know, I was talking about this on Twitter with somebody today, and I…”

“there is no theory of what that would be, like, a secure encryption means no one can read it, but the police can read it, ok so it's not secure.”

“the more that you try and make things open and standardised, And interoperable and portable, the more you're actually describing cable TV, not the internet. Because the whole fucking point of the internet is actually how little of it is standardized, as much as how much, depending on which layer in the stack you're…”

“as a conflict between interoperability and privacy, because if you say, you know, you can say, make it easy to explain. You know, the competition regulator says, make it easy to export data, and the privacy regulator says, make it hard to export data, because actually most of the data isn't your data. You know, if…”

“what the tech industry always wanted to do was to turn TV into YouTube or Spotify. That is to say, or what YouTube or Spotify then became, which is you've got this single universal library of everything, and you pay one fee, that's a reasonable amount of money, and not like 500 bucks a month, but you, and, and you get…”

“you're asking for a recommendation algorithm that will drive all the readers to you, but you're also asking to own your list, and I think that's kind of a contradiction in terms, because if what you're saying is, I want somebody to open the app and have the app suggest stuff to them, but I also want for me to own and…”

“Cryptocurrencies for want of a better term are not fundamentally about replacing gold and fiat currency and being a store medium of storage. That's just sort of the one of the early and obvious applications. What you're really seeing here is a way to run an open source computer.”

“And so there's a whole bunch of reasons why you tend to get simplifying layers and abstracting layers and aggregating layers. Um, you know, most people don't open a command line on their PC. They don't want to. They just want to click on the icon that says internet.”

“NFTs aren't about art either, just as crypto isn't about money. Um, the point, you know, what we're still doing is trying to work out what the building blocks are. And so the NFT might be another building block within how a crypto social system or publishing system might work.”

“Tech doesn't work like that. It hasn't worked like that since the seventies, maybe the eighties, but the days when like big companies could say, right, we're going to build the future. Like that's not how the future gets built.”

“The stock price going up does not help the company, except that it makes them easier for them to raise capital by selling stock and issuing stock options. But the price going up itself doesn't tell you that they sold more product. Whereas a token activity in the token is both people speculating and actual real use.”

“Telcos aren't a technology business. They're infrastructure business. Netflix isn't, isn't a software company. It's a TV company. On the other hand, Airbnb, but Airbnb, but Airbnb isn't a hotel company. It is a software company.”

“There's a very standard presumption in Silicon Valley that software companies can learn other industries faster than those other industries can learn software. And that's generally true, but. Well, it's generally true, but it might not matter. I think that's the kind of the crucial point. Your software might be…”

“a lot of like consumer tech now is as much pop culture as it is tech. You know, is Snapchat tech or is that pop culture? You know, that, the inside, whatever you think the answer was, it wasn't software engineering. It was some insight about how people wanted to feel.”

“I think Apple sees privacy as sort of analogous to malware. It thinks that this is an architectural problem on the computer. It controls the computer. They make the operating system. It's their job to fix it in the same way that it was sort of Microsoft's job to stop viruses. It's Apple's job to stop websites, apps,…”

“privacy is a strategic asset. Um, you know, there's an old line in Silicon Valley that everyone is giving somebody else's business model away for free. Apple doesn't have, it doesn't have a social network, doesn't have a search engine, doesn't really have a, it doesn't really have an advertising business or a very…”

“So the aggregate of all of this is basically the strong get stronger, the big get bigger. The advertising moves to the big, strong, established sites. Small sites, new interim sites, less targeted sites makes less money. Content moves behind paywalls.”

“if you say you can't buy reach, what you're actually saying is you can only have organic reach. So Trump has got however many followers he's had, so he's kind of fine. So, so when you say you can't do political advertising, but you can have organic reach, which means organic advertising, you're saying celebrities and…”

“competition conflicts, almost everything that we want to do here. Competition conflicts with privacy conflicts with everything else. You pick one.”

“The big strategic competition in these markets is not someone who's in your market that fits an antitrust lawyer's definition of your market. The competitive threat is from somebody who changes the whole fucking business into something else, or offers your customers a completely different way of doing the same thing.”

“Tesla, this is the argument. Is it a software company or a car company? If it's a car company, it's screwed. If it's a software company, everyone else is screwed.”

“Um, and so for Facebook, paradoxically, VR needs to not be about games.”

“the world in which all the ideas came from within 50 miles of Silicon Valley, well, that's kind of over.”

“If you wanted to make an Instagram competitor, I would like to see everything that you've posted and everything that you'd like, and I also want to see everyone you follow and everything they like, because that's what Instagram uses to give me recommendations. Oh, but that's not my data. That's their data. So how does…”

“The trouble is, as I mentioned, we've kind of run out of people now. So there's not like another step change to come in that, in that kind of process.”

“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph. And so actually, that's why I think Facebook bolting reels…”

“if Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the, um, prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition problem. It's something else.”

“if Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it, from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube. Like, the reason it's hard to make another YouTube…”

“the enforcement is so disconnected from the original decision that, like, nobody who's actually Nobody who's making those decisions understands that in 10 years' time they'll be defined as a monopoly. I mean, they're arguing about it now. You know, there's people in Silicon Valley saying, what are you talking about?…”

“A couple of years ago, there was this whole thing in India of lynch mobs forming based on wild rumors that were spreading on WhatsApp, which was super interesting because WhatsApp is not, doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't have advertising. And so like those kind of common reflexive, well, it's the algorithm and…”

“the creation of bad stuff is fundamentally infinitely scalable, because it's people. It's four billion people saying, retweeting stuff that fits their prejudices. Um, and the content moderation or the virus scanning is fundamentally unscalable, because you're one at a timing it. You're picking one thing after another.…”

“the first 25 years of the consumer internet was basically American, and the big companies, you know, the agenda, and therefore the kind of the cultural attitudes and the legal attitudes to how they should work were all American. And you can, again, you can generalize a bit too much, you know, clearly everyone has their…”

“part of the point of regulation is that it's expensive and it helps incumbents. You know, if you, Facebook has whatever it is, 30, 40,000 human moderators. If you create a law that says if you have a social network, a human being has to look at every post, well, that means you can't create a new social network.…”

“Instead of spending all of your money on rent, you spend all your money on Instagram, unless you have some other way of getting, unless you have some other way of getting to people. But if you're just selling a commodity product, you know, in a commodity Channel. Guess what? Like, you're not going to make any money.”

“the fixed costs and the barriers to entry are gone. So you don't need to rent the store and get up on the ground of inventory necessarily. You don't need the kind of, the kind of, the initial expenditure might have changed completely. It doesn't mean that getting to a hundred grand of revenue is going to be easy. In…”

“if you're going to do Instacart, say, You can launch in San Francisco, and then you can pick 10 more, and then 20 more, and then 10 more, and then 30 more, and you can kind of go, go out step by step by step across the country. Whereas in Europe, you couldn't do like London, and then Paris, Barcelona, and Milan, and…”

“I sometimes describe things like, um, web summit and four years from now, it's being like gay pride. Which is to say, um, if you live in Stanford, you don't need an event to tell you. If you grew up in Berkeley or Stanford, you don't need an event to tell you about startups. But if you didn't, and if you grew up in a…”

“And what seems to have happened is that the locks guys won. Because there's not really a network effect. There's not actually very much software to the lock by itself. Um, it just has to lock and unlock based on something you do on your smartphone, and they can buy that from a chip manufacturer or a third party and…”

“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 something that has a browser, or it can be on a smartphone or a…”

“The classic thing that drives me crazy, people talking about Apple, thinking that the app store is like a primary revenue driver for Apple, when the whole purpose of the app store is to drive sales of a 700 dollar iPhone every two years at a 50% gross margin.”

“Sort of the all-knowing, wants to be the all-knowing oracle, and you can ask it something, and it will just know the answer, or it'll even suggest it before you, you do it. Whereas Apple, it's more like, kind of the, I don't know, it's like the servant that follows you around and hands you things as you need them…”

“And I think the kind of the platformization that we saw earlier is interesting as an attempt to solve some of the problems that Google is solving with its kind of pervasive, all-knowing AI, but getting third-party developers to solve those problems instead.”

“And I think this is kind of the point that there's, you could almost say, like, the iPad Pro is like, this is the seven, now the seven oh seven. It's the one at which you point, okay, well, the Lockheed Constellation is a beautiful aircraft.”

“So the idea that this is about identity is kind of a Western assumption, that actually those people in Burma are using Facebook like Twitter, with no connection to their identity at all.”

“The challenge, the challenge is that you, you have that nice, easy, frictionless experience and you're on Facebook and then you wake up one morning and your traffic's down by three quarters.”

“Google can tell you what you want when you already know you want it. It might get you like a magazine article that says here are 10 things that you want, but it will not, you can't go to Google and say, like, where should I go on holiday? What handbag should I buy? What lamp should I buy? It doesn't, it's not…”

“The things tend to look best, and they tend to look most refined, and they tend to have all the really coolest stuff just before they're about to be completely obsolete.”

“if you want to get read, you've got to be in some kind of a platform that's giving your audience, and increasingly that means Facebook, or it means Medium, or it means LinkedIn, or it means some other intermediate platform that kind of comes with an implicit ad blocker, a revenue model, a filter, some other set of…”

“Whether it's good or not, it's the kind of thing that's very, that's much more difficult for an Android OEM to do because Apple controls the operating system and all the apps as well. Whereas whenever Samsung tries to do something like that, it only works with the Samsung apps because developers say, well, why would I…”

“the current structure of the TV industry works really well for the TV industry, and nobody has a big incentive to change it.”

“It's a lot easier for software companies, software people to learn something else than people from another industry to learn software.”

“And it used to be that they go public early on the curve, and there's way more growth to come, and now they're going public when they're almost at the end of the curve, and so if you buy it in the IPA, well, you've kind of got all it's ever going to be.”

“When you put money into a private company, on the other hand, particularly at these late, with these late stage deals, you have a bunch of what, um, tends euphemistically to be called a structure. Around it, which means you have things like liquidity preferences, and so, and liquidation preferences, and so on. Um, and…”

“And then you layer any discovery mechanism that you lay onto that works until you try and encompass the whole of the web, and then it just collapses under its own weight.”

“incidentally, photos to some extent have replaced music as a lock-in.”

“Once we went to streaming services, it became really, really easy to switch from device to device, and so content really isn't a strategic lever anymore. It may be, we'll see what Apple does with music next week, but, you know, for the sake of argument, right now, content doesn't matter to Apple or Google. It's just a…”

“you aren't ever going to be a ten billion or twenty billion dollar company, because they're not your users, they're all Facebook users.”

“So what effectively what Facebook's trying to do is make Snapchat compete with the whole app store. Because Snapchat is only going to have the content that Snapchat dreams up, whereas Facebook Messenger will have the content that anybody can dream up and decide to plug into it.”

“In a funny sort of sense, it's like you could be too far up the stack to do this, just as you could be too far down the stack to do this. So just as it doesn't really make sense for a mobile operator or a handset maker to try and build a social network, it doesn't necessarily make sense for a social network to try and…”

“one of the key reasons to buy something on Amazon particularly on mobile as it's already set up with your account, so you don't need to enter a credit card in. Well, if you've got Apple Pay, then you don't need that, that, all of that aggregation goes away.”

“When you combine all of those together, it's not that there's two or three times more devices. It's that you've got five or 10 X more opportunity.”

“if you were to say to me, I'm going to disrupt the mobile business, I would say to you, with what spectrum? And if you have no answer to that, then I'm not interested. And the same, in the same sense, if you say to me, I'm going to disrupt the TV business, then I will say, well, with what content? Who's going to make…”

“so what Apple is doing, what Google is doing is they say, well, the device is dumb gloss, and all the cool stuff's happening in the cloud. And what Apple is doing is saying, no, no, no, no, the cloud is just dumb storage.”

“there's always this sort of misperception that you can turn up with technology and disrupt it, but actually the, the point of Netflix and the reason why the existing model is so strong is it's actually, no, it's, it's the content. That's, that's the lock on all of this stuff, and having the business model to make the…”

“You can't turn up with a better rocket. You just have to, actually, all you have to do is turn up with an enormous tank full of kerosene. You have to turn up with an awful lot of money.”

“The only people who can disrupt Bloomberg are people who've never seen it and have no idea what you use it for.”

“the platform war ended and Google and Apple both won, because Google and Apple both got what they wanted, but they wanted different things.”

“The interesting thing about groceries is that it breaks the Amazon model. In fact, it breaks the whole e-commerce model, because the whole point of Amazon is that everything is a commodity.”

“the winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the, um, the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was not predictable at the time how or why they would…”

“pretty much every enterprise software company is a relational database, but nobody looks at CRM or Salesforce or SuccessFactors and says, well, that won't work because Oracle has all the database.”

“What is it that crypto automates? Well, it automates another kind of technology. It automates, well, money, but it automates trust.”

“Today, you can just go to Shenzhen and say, we'll have a number three and number 15, please, and then it gets put together for you. And so the question is more about the vision and the route to market than the, kind of, the underlying, um, core technology.”

“if you're a great accountant, or a great video editor, or a great graphic designer, or a great salesperson, or a great lawyer, those are different skills to being the person who's going to work out the right way to make a really great piece of legal discovery software, or a really great piece of sales enablement, a…”

“You're not the right person to see all of those problems. You're also not the right person to get everybody to use this. And so there's just this kind of huge gap between we give everyone a tool that can make stuff, and therefore everyone is going to make new tools.”

“writing the code isn't the hard part. Writing the hard part is knowing what the code should be doing. It's seeing the problem and knowing the right way to do it. It's the opinion.”

“the way that all of this is sort of fundamentally different from previous platform shifts, is that with, you know, three G or the iPhone or the web or whatever it was, You didn't know what was going to happen next, but you knew the physical limits. Like, you know, 19, 95, you knew that telcos weren't going to give…”

“software developers are the accountancy of VisiCalc. Like, oh my God, this changes everything. Like before VisiCalc and after VisiCalc. Before, before Claude Code and after Claude Code.”

“What you actually pay Bain to do is to go and walk all over your, and to try your company and work out. Yes, but why is it that you didn't do that? And how did the politics of this work? And what do you actually need to do? And let's go and talk to your customers and work out what they actually think, as opposed to…”

“we have no theory of what human intelligence is. We have no theory of why these models work so well. We have no theory of how much better they will get. So we're all just kind of vibes forecasting as to what will happen.”

“And we're still at the stage of, you know, taking a PDF of your catalog and putting it in your company website, um, as we try and work out what we should do with AI.”

“tell that next time you hear a software developer saying, like, AI is a completely different thing, and nobody has ever abstracted software like this before, like, yeah, we've been doing this for 30 years, 50 years.”

“Well, you know, everyone in, in, generally in a bubble, everybody's a rational actor. Almost everyone's a rational actor given their situation.”

“The hard part of writing software is not writing code. It's all the other stuff around, like, what, what should the code be doing? And how would we tell people that they should be using it? And what should we charge? And how do we go to market? And which bit of the market should we be selling to? It's all the other…”

“The first of them is, well, clearly this is an order of magnitude, maybe several orders of magnitude, cheaper to make any given piece of software. A piece of software that you might have thought of 10 years ago that has nothing to do with AI, you can use AI to make that thing much more quickly, much more cheaply.”

“The underlying point, though, is I think the hard part of making software is almost never writing the code.”

“the fields where AI is actually works best right now are the fields where people are really angry about it and sure it's useless. ... Whereas the fields where it doesn't, really doesn't quite work, or needs an awful lot of other stuff around it, The fields where people are sure that it works right now.”

“memory is a feature and a stickiness, not network effect.”

“If you're using this all day, every day, you're not a typical user. It's like the paradox. Normally you would say if you're only using this once a week, you don't, you shouldn't be working on it. You should only be working on it if you're using it every day. The paradox here would be like, you should only be working on…”

“either it's already here and it's just more software or it's five years away and will always be five years away.”

“They're unbundling chat GPT, just as the enterprise software company of 10 years ago was unbundling Oracle or Google or Excel.”

“All AI questions have one of two answers. The answer is either no one knows, like how much better will the models get, for example, um, you know, what happens to, you know, does inference cost collapse and we no longer need any more in video chips? No one knows. And the other side of the question is, okay, it'll work…”

“The other side of it is that film was this high margin product where they had a bunch of unique intellectual property, and digital cameras are a low margin commodity, where they were competing with the entire consumer electronics industry with no differentiation. And so even if they go, even at the point being, even if…”

“So I'd actually, I think it's actually the opposite, which is that everyone's kind of using the same data. Which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that Meta has is not actually enough to move, to be a kind of a fundamental difference in what you can train with.”

“Talking about regulating AI as AI is the wrong level of abstraction. It's like saying we're going to regulate databases, or regulate spreadsheets, or regulate cars.”

“You have that, the OpenAI and people have been doing memory, where it remembers what else you've asked, but that seems more like a switching cost than a network effect, and also it might be easier for you to just ask it what it knows about you and then tell Claude, or vice versa.”

“Now I can just say, is this what ChatGPT would have said? And if the answer is, this is what ChatGPT would have said, then I don't publish it. Not because people can get it from ChatGPT, but because anyone would have said that.”

“But if you go to it and say, give me a, a 40 page report on something I don't know much about, you can't trust any line of that report, because most of it will be right, probably, or it will be roughly right, but if there's anything, but you won't be able to depend on any statement in that report actually being…”

“I think that stickiness, I don't think it's a network effect.”

“And there's a trap with these humanoid robots, which is some people look at them and think it's AGI, and it's not, it's just a robot that's got legs instead of wheels, but it's still a robot.”

“Silicon Valley really has this problem in not understanding that other industries are hard. Like, the airline business is hard. They're not just idiots. It's difficult.”

“It's my, it's my point about, about what do you mean by, when you say AI, what's the right level of abstraction here? Should you be talking about regulating AI, or should you be talking about, we don't want people using face recognition to decide who can get into a conference hall, which is not an AI question, that's…”

“These models are very good at automating certain kinds of things, but not others. They get stuff wrong, or rather what they do is they say, what would an answer to this question probably look like? That's about the best way I can come up with formulating it right now. And there are some classes of the question where…”

“There's this whole sort of thesis of bottom up enterprise software sales that you don't need to sell to the CIO. You make this amazing cool tool and the users will discover it and use it. And what actually happens is that most that that always works for like the first five percent of the market, but most users in most…”

“And so just being, like, 75% as good as Google costs hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars just to have the whole thing. It's like, it's, it's, it's, there's a, there's a fixed cost to indexing the web.”

“Because a million dollars gets you developing, it does not get you deploying, even from, even at Accenture's rates.”

“So you need to have a use case where either it doesn't matter if it's not a hundred percent right, which is, you know, Give me 50 ideas for slogan for a new brand of toothpaste. Like there's not, you're not, there's not like a complete. There's no right answer or wrong answer to that. There's only better or worse…”

“And there's been like two things in the history of enterprise software. This has worked. I mean, one of them is Slack and I forget what the other one is. And what happens is you get to like five or 10% of your tan, and then you run out of the kind of people who will go out and look for cool new software. And after…”

“the EU is trying to say, look, let's just have like a kind of general, generalized rules that will sort of try and capture lots of different questions at once. Um, the problem is, of course, as soon as you get into how does Apple actually implement this in the app store. You discover, no, it's not simple, and you are…”

“So it's sort of easy to say, oh, well, you have to publish what your training data is, but that's not Going to produce something that's, that's not going to produce something that's easy for you to audit.”

“You re-run all of the arguments we had around content moderation and social media of what should people be allowed to say. You either say more or less anything, which is Elon Musk's idea, or you end up with a long list of, of, of criteria, which is where Facebook has had to go. But it's not going to be easy either way.”

“tech has basically not been a problem for the book industry. Um, you know, obviously lots has changed, and they've got Amazon as this one giant customer, but we did not move to a model in which everybody gets all the books they want, and all the books are digital, and the publishing model breaks up, and like the whole…”

“with all of these subscription models, you're capping your whales. Um, so with music, you had a small number of people who were paying a hundred dollars a month or more, whatever it was, and now they can only, for CDs, now they can get everything for 10 dollars a month for Spotify, but there's way huge number of other…”

“And what I wrote last summer was that Meta basically has the right price and is working towards the right device. And Apple has almost the right device and is working back towards the right price.”

“The right way to present text and pictures and data is in, is in two D.”

“ChatGPT is like a giant job creation scheme for lawyers and consultancies. Because the lawyers have to work out who we're suing, and what all the new contracts look like, and the consultancies, and people actually have to go and deploy all of this stuff.”

“I think regulating AI, quote unquote, is the wrong level of abstraction. To me, that's like saying, well, look, you know, FTX did all this fraud with spreadsheets, so clearly we need to regulate spreadsheets.”

“The problem with the Fediverse model is so much of the experience design has to be in the client. And if it's distributed and there's 50 clients, that doesn't work in the same way.”

“if you're trying to build a competitor to Instagram, I wouldn't want Tony Karen Brown's posts. What I want is who's liked Tony Karen's posts, Tony's posts, and what else did they like? And who liked their posts, and who else liked that? There's like these sort of concentric circles of interconnected, of signal, um,…”

“If you're building a recommendation system that says anybody can publish anything they like, and there's no gatekeeping, and there's no algorithms, guess what? You've got 10,000 things in your feed every day, and you can't find anything. It's like you're trying to build a perpetual motion machine.”

“The other half of it is the reason that you're downranked in the newsfeed is because people don't care, A, people don't care about you that much, B, they followed 50 of your competitors, and B, they have a hundred friends. And there's no solution to that.”

“the way I always used to talk about machine learning is it gives you infinite interns. You can get an intern to do something. Anything you can get an intern to do, machine learning can do for you, you know.”

“And so this point is a command line again. And this is Bill Gates's point that GUIs replace command lines. Well, you get, you've just given me a command line now. That's what, that's what a prompt is.”

“I mean, there's a bunch of use cases where it doesn't matter how good the model is, a chatbot is just not the right interface.”

“once you've won a space that has strong network effects, then the threat is not from something that's the same, but 10% better. The threat is from something that either solves the underlying problem in some completely different way or complete or unbundles you piece by piece.”

“trending topics and search are the two ways things that tend to drive dog piles. And tend to drive everyone rushing to scream at somebody.”

“speaking from a business perspective, news is a lot more trouble than it's worth. It's not actually particularly good for business because it's a huge amount of aggravation and toxicity and anger and problem. And it doesn't actually drive a lot of, it certainly doesn't drive any money and it doesn't really drive a lot…”

“All people who think that Elon Musk is brilliant, and if you point out that any particular problem or mention him in anything but less than sycophantic terms, they're all going to stay, they're not going to go to Threads. All the Nazis are going to go, I'll stay on Mastodon. All the Trotskyists are going to stay on…”

“In that sense, it's actually, you could kind of compare it to the Macintosh, which launches in 1984 and was over 7000 dollars in today's money. And most people still didn't know why they needed it. And I think Apple only sold like half a million in the first year or two, maybe less.”

“I don't think the future of productivity is seeing more columns in Excel. I think it's having an AI that builds the model for you.”

“to actually kind of make any questions about what companies are going to happen and how we're going to use this, you always have to kind of park the AGI conversation, because if it happens, then all bets are off.”

“The challenge is, um, as I always, I've always been saying, if you use this as a general search, then the error rates might matter and you can't tell.”

“as soon as you move away from make this shot better, you're probably moving away from a prompt box, and you're probably moving to buttons, and switches, and options, and palettes, and lists of possibilities, and a screen that says, okay, here are six different colour casts you could use, which one of them you want.”

“to me, this is part of the challenge of ChatTPT versus Google is that, um, Google says here are 10 links that might be the answer. Whereas ChatGPT says this is the answer, and it's, this is the answer. But it's, it's not, you could argue that what it should be saying is like, here is a synthesis of some stuff I read on…”

“anybody can buy a camera, but that doesn't make you a photographer. You know, anybody can fire up mid journey. That doesn't mean you're going to, you know, doesn't mean you're going to produce something great in the way that somebody who has the right sensibility is getting to produce something great. So I don't like…”

“the nature of art is that you can't copy it. If you can copy it, it's not art.”

“The theory that all of this kind of is on a track to AGI in a sense is that you can create AGI out of the collective Knowledge of humanity, which is sort of what GPT is trying to do. It's just to give it, give it all the texts that there is on the internet and like intelligence pops out of that.”

“It's making a pattern without any structural understanding of what the actual thing actually is.”

“This is a two by two matrix, which is, you know, does the error matter and can you spot the error?”

“the incumbent's always trying to make the new thing a feature. Um, and so that's very obviously what's happening with Microsoft and Google, including this in PowerPoint and office and of course in search and everything else. Um, but what, what, what actually happens is, is then people come along and make something new.…”

“if you're going to, you know, build a new system that will just tell you what the story was without linking or giving you credit, that's very different from, um, you know, what Google and Facebook do, which is you search for a new story and they tell you where to read it, and the newspaper is under the impression that…”

“you can't, you know, you cannot deterministically control what it says. So you can kind of put crude keyword filters on. You can count, you can put kind of crude, crude keyword filters sort of on top, but you can't guarantee that it's not going to you talk about some stuff that you don't want it to talk about. I mean,…”

“I don't get the impression that TikTok has that same mechanic of, like, I can build a permanent audience there, and that it's more that you are more dependent on the river, on being thrown up to the river, because, you know, TikTok, YouTube gives you all these thumbnails, and you can click which ones you want, whereas…”

“The purpose of the app store is to sell iPhones. I mean, it has revenue, and it has a cost base, but it also sells iPhones.”

“And if you're going to pay to be there, then the odds are that there's an ROI on that, and the reason there's an ROI is that If you pay to be there, people buy it. And, you know, that is actually a kind of a quality filter.”

“the invention is how to scale, but most of what it actually does is stuff that retailers were doing in 1950 or 1900, or even like 1860, 18, 70. Like, private label goods was always a hilarious thing. I mean, that, the freak out around private label goods has now sort of mostly receded. I think most people have kind of…”

“And then everything else, like everything that you pay below the gross margin line, um, is how is it that you get the product to the consumer? All of that is now sort of up for grabs. You know, in the past you couldn't say, should we open a city? Should we open shops in that city or just advertise there? Or should we…”

“And the point is, there's sort of some domains where, like, a 90% accuracy produces a fantastic result, and you don't see or care the last 10%, and there's other domains where the last 10% is a problem.”

“And so this is why you have GitHub saying, well, we're going to call this Copilot, and like, it's writing code for you, but you're, you're a coder, you can look at it and see. You can look at it and check. And so what are the domains where, um, You can tell it's wrong. Versus what are the domains where being wrong is a…”

“TikTok is not Different to YouTube in any sort of fundamental product sense. It's different in UX.”

“and the same thing with, with, with machine learning models, this is what we've always been saying. You know, get right back to kind of, I don't have any structural understanding of what it is. You know, they may recognize the difference, they may be able to tell a cat from a dog, 93.2% of the time, but they don't know…”

“There are two different classes. So one, which is, it's wrong and you don't realize that it's wrong. And the other is that it's right and you don't want it to be right. And you might not be able to tell in either case.”

“So, you know, you do a database or a financial model, you know, you've made a series of logical steps and it will follow those logical steps. Whereas with, um, with machine learning systems, you're saying do something that's sort of like that, and it will be sort of like that. Um, and so the, but, but the point is…”

“Well, it's, it's a programming language. You are feeding the statistical engine logical steps. You are saying double plus this, minus that, Conclude this, de-emphasize that, emphasize this, and you've ended up with a whole paragraph of instructions, which is actually a formula. You've given it an Excel formula,…”

“Very often what's happening is the acquisitions are being used in order to make yourself more competitive and to gain a competitive lever and to allow you to, you know, and to make the industry more competitive, not less competitive.”

“the competitive threat in tech is generally not someone doing the same thing as you, but better. Or, or, or, or let me kind of qualify that. Each market sort of goes for an S-curve, and there's like an early period where everyone's fighting it out to win. So this is like the, at the time when there were 10 different PC…”

“What you're, what you're actually getting here is say to me everything you know about this. Which is, it's actually, it's actually bullshitting.”

“I think there's a, you can, one can dismiss very quickly the concept, oh my god, this is like the end of art. No, no more than Photoshop was. Um, it's another form. It's another thing that you can do.”

“And I just think there's like, you know, rather like Shin, there's going to be dozens and dozens and dozens of these companies around the sort of the higher level point is everything about the channel and the go to market and the media filters through which a brand would get to market have been blown apart. Everything…”

“It's as though you open the internet, you get your TCP, it takes you a week to get your TCP IP working, you've found something you can dial up to to connect, it's taken your week of work, you've got it working, you open a command line, you ping a known IP address, it pings back. Okay, now what? That's sort of what it's…”

“If you trade FX, you will lose all your money. There are people who work inside, you know, very large investment banks and hedge funds, who make fractions of a tiny fraction of a percent Um, arbitraging FX spreads. Nobody else makes any money on this, and why should you?”

“That a smartphone is actually much less immersive than a PC. You're not sitting in front of it for three hours a day, just looking at that screen. Instead, it's something that you do in 5:10 seconds, you know, that you can pick up and put down. That it's with you all the time, but you can put it in your pocket all the…”

“Most people don't design cars for a living. Most people do not work in three D. Still pretty niche. Salesforce or email, or like most people are not actually editing, doing work that involves a three D object.”

“that's not how technology gets built. And it is sort of, and there's two problems with this. The first of them is like, you're not engaging with the complexity of why there are gatekeepers and, you know, why this stuff works like this. And all the reasons why, the reasons why the world is as it is will not just…”

“And the thing about, talking about this with the internet, like the internet is completely interoperable, At the lower levels of the stack with IP and HTTP and SSL and so on. But once you're in the browser, like if you're building Amazon, you don't need to worry about how Instagram works. Like there isn't one, you…”

“And so even if you think that VR and AR are going to work and are going to be the universal thing, think of anything you're doing now as pure experiment, as pure experiment, pure learning, pure interest, pure interest, with no expectation that this is going to be meaningful.”

“there's a whole class of content where human, human touched originality is not particularly important. Um, whether it's, you know, tourism pictures or pictures of sunsets or pictures of, um, you know, interiors or pictures of fast cars, or, you know, there's a huge amount of very generic content that gets huge traffic.”

“You could make a shitload more Mozart. You wouldn't, that wouldn't get you Beethoven. And you might stumble on Beethoven, but you would know, it wouldn't know it was Beethoven to do more of that. And it would be buried in the other billion things that you've done.”

“it does less than Photoshop or Illustrator on one axis, but it has this whole bunch of new stuff on another axis and so pulls this whole new market in.”

“Facebook has struggled a lot more to get reels working because that's actually a different graph. It's not just another thing you would share with your friends. It's a whole other graph of different people.”

“it's really difficult to add that real time, multiple people working on it, multiple people collaborating at the same time to like a 50 meg binary file that was never intended for that and software that was never built for that. And so you'd almost kind of have to go off and build like a whole other thing, at which…”

“the TAM for the collaboration around the video edit was actually much bigger than the TAM for the video edit.”

“all questions that matter for Netflix are TV industry questions. What rights? What shows? What happens as the incumbents pull their shows off Netflix? What budget should they have? What stars? What kind of, they're all TV questions. There's no technology questions here.”

“You know, as a VC, if you didn't look at the crazy maniac who incinerated a bunch of money, but also built something really valuable, if you didn't look at his second thing, you're kind of not doing your job.”

“it's not Internet of Things, it's things connected to the internet. And they don't actually need to talk, they don't actually need to talk to each other or communicate. Some of them, in some cases, that might be useful, but most of the time it kind of isn't.”

“The hardware part mattered much more than the software part, and it's a classic case of what Clay Christensen called sustaining innovation, which is you get absorbed into these in the existing industry.”

“It's not about putting medicine in boxes and shipping it to you. Even the medicine part isn't about, isn't about the putting it in the boxes part. It's the, what are you paying? And why does insulin cost a thousand dollars in America and 50 bucks everywhere else on earth? Well, that's not a parcel. That's not a…”

“And of course this didn't really work because That level of primitive was actually better done inside AWS or inside Azure rather than as a standalone startup. And B, if you're like Caterpillar or like Chase, you can't Chase, like you can't buy natural language processing. You need several levels more of abstraction.”

“all of the systems that we're looking at now are no more intelligent than a calculator. You know, a calculator can do mass much quicker than you, but we don't think it's intelligent. It doesn't know what the mass is.”

“Is this is the privacy company that thinks they've gone through all this elaborate, complicated work to do it in a way that's private, and they get this huge backlash, which says to me, like, we don't have a coherent sense of what we mean by privacy, and so we've thrown away the old way of doing online advertising…”

“There's another point, which is one I've made in a different context, which is, yes, but as a brand or retailer, now you're looking at your ad budget as interchangeable with your rent. So you're asking the question, should we rent more stores, or should we run more ads, or do free returns, or cut the prices, or do…”

“Um, and so I think that, you know, there's sort of a grounding point, you know, if in five to 10 years, we are all using consumer services or business services or, you know, infrastructure or something that's all running on blockchains, which is basically what we mean by web three. Like you can build Instagram on a…”

“I mean, it's like, but it's like, it's like saying you can connect your Tinder with your LinkedIn, with your Instagram. They're not the same thing.”

“You can take some on lower level components back and forth, or high level components, but you're never going to have all of them completely interoperable, because then they wouldn't, well, then they wouldn't be different things.”

“The challenge is at this point, we're sort of designing social networks in 10 years time. Which kind of comes back to my, you know, the more we spend time we spend saying, so this is how I think it's all going to work. The more you're like, we have no idea how this is going to work. So maybe don't worry about it quite…”

“In the sense that sort of they become the same, they become aspects of the same problem where they used to be separate parts of the company. Um, so, I mean, the way I always phrase this is that in the past, you couldn't say, should we open stores in that state or just advertise there? And now you do. Now it's all one…”

“there's a sort of diminishing, not just diminishing return, but almost kind of a negative return to scale, that after a certain point, adding more TV shows, actually make, does, certainly doesn't make the experience better, and might even make it worse. Because now you just don't know that it exists, and you'd never…”

“Because if you're trying to solve the blank canvas thing, that, I don't think you could do that at the protocol level. I think you need to do that at the UI level. So you need everyone using the same UI.”

“And when you have hundreds of millions or billions of people using your product, Like, you need content moderation because otherwise just group dynamics means it turned into a chat. It just turns into a world of shit. And people, anybody who's really worked in a social network understands this.”

“that the reason why you've got this furious innovation in messaging apps, and so many of them that can do different things and behave in different ways, is because they don't have to be interoperable. And if they had to be interoperable, then you couldn't do half this stuff, because you'd have to wait for everyone else…”

“Apple is now, you know, has a credit card and the sort of talk that it's building a bunch of sort of financial infrastructure. It's not doing that because it wants to overturn the existing market structure of banking. It's doing that for Apple reasons.”

“in a web three model, you as a, you know, you would own, you would own both who subscribed to you, and you would also, in a sense, own what you subscribed to, because it would, It's sort of transparent and composable. You know, any bit of it is addressable. You can point it any bit at the stack and own that bit.”

“And yes, the people who followed me on the old system will see me on new one, but the other half of it is a new one has got to have billions of users because Otherwise, in a sense, why am I going there? If not, because it's, you know, question A might be I don't like the content policy or I don't like the monetization…”

“most of what Instagram knows about you isn't your, your data. It's who liked you and what else they liked and who liked those people and what else are the things those posted and which, which of your pictures they saw and didn't like, um, or didn't press like on and what other pictures were in their feed. And so…”

“what you see when the Amazon screen loads is not just a database output, there's an awful lot of work in that, and so, sorry, I'm being very incoherent here, but like, I don't think you can separate the client from the data like that. Certainly in, on the web, in, in, in, in, to continue this point, it's not really…”

“the visible complexity goes up in a kind of a bell curve. And then you reach a point by like, you know, you get GUIs and Windows and Mac and so on that the visible complexity starts going down. Even as though you carry on getting more and more plumbing underneath. And same with the internet. And sort of where Bitcoin…”

“Well, the day, this is a dangerous thing, because this is what you've got with COVID, of people saying, go off and do your own research. No, you do actually need the intermediary layer.”

“a big piece of not knowing where this is from is, you know, there's a huge amount of selectivity in the images we see. So we see, we're getting images from the Ukrainians. We're not getting images from the Russians. Partly because the Russians wanted to pretend that nothing was happening. Partly because the only…”

“It would allow you to build, not just to build a product in a different way, but build a different kind of product, which are two different important points”

“open source was hugely important in creating technology infrastructure and plumbing of every kind. And it was a much better organizational model for writing that software. It was not a great organizational model for writing end user software for consumers.”

“And crypto is basically sort of SaaS meets open source. So it's all sort of running publicly in the cloud. And so you can make different applications with this. You can do these incentive structures and open governance structures and portability that you can't do with a database.”

“there's a kind of a dumb criticism is to say the fact that we don't have email and the web and so on yet for, for blockchain tells us we never will, which is just dumb. And there's, oh, well it happened in the first 10 years for the internet and we've been 10 years in blockchain. Like, why is that the timeline? Maybe…”

“The TAM is not the advertising budget. The TAM is the whole thing, you know. Now, the counter to that is, of course, it works both ways, because your advertising spend is competing with rent, not just the other way around.”

“Technology isn't doing DTC soap companies. It's soap people and marketing people do DTC soap companies.”

“And in the same way that like the second 50 years of the car industry wasn't about cars, it was about Walmart and McDonald's and suburbia and freeways. And, you know, the fact that everyone had a car.”

“Netflix, all the questions are TV questions, like what shows, what light structures, what talent, how do they compete with Disney, what's HBO going to do, you know, what's their share of production in the UK, what happens if France starts regulating them, not that anyone cares about the French market, but, you know,…”

“Google has to have a bunch of compliance people. Okay. That doesn't change anything for anyone in Silicon Valley. It's just compliance people. It's just cost. It's just money on the EPS.”

“there's such a separation between the stuff that tech is obsessed with building and the tech that people outside of tech are obsessed by, which is Shopify. Like, what's the company that everyone outside tech is obsessed by? Shopify, not Naked Ape or Bored Ape or whatever it's called. Like, that's not what the center…”

“that retail that that retail tv and so on um advertising and now being completely overturned by stuff that people in tech were obsessed by 15 years ago”

“you get a whiteboard and you write VR, AR, social, crypto, place, tradable goods, creator economy, and you draw a box around this and above the box you write metaverse. Like, okay, but that doesn't mean it exists or you can buy it or invest in it. It's just a way of thinking about a whole bunch of stuff that's already…”

“The interesting thing is, of course, the abstracting and the simplifying means it gets more centralized, almost inherently.”

“vast majority of people in tech, this doesn't really affect how they build their business, or it will be something like GDPR, which is just kind of a pain in the ass, but it doesn't actually change what your business is or how it works.”

“even where you don't have, like, you know, conscious purpose behind this, you know, by default, any Western company will have assumptions as to how stuff works that will not necessarily be, and tend to raise the standard of behavior in a country that doesn't have those assumptions, because that's just how it works.”

“what they've sort of done is modularized, modularized the way that they roll out the hardware and the software in such a way that they can get that Predictable, repeatable thing happening every year without delaying.”

“Because I'm investing in this game, and this is a thing that we're going to own for the next seven to 10 years, which is venture capital's investing horizon. Whereas if it's, you know, if it's, if, whereas if games work more like movies, and I'm going to invest in this movie, and like, that doesn't work for the…”

“And so this is why WhatsApp and Skype basically had no effect on telecoms industry or, or had a very, um, second order effect on the telecoms industry because they had to change their pricing models.”

“once everything calms down, and you build sewers, and you build, have a police department, and you have a social safety net, cities are great. But you do kind of need to build the sewers.”

“Okay, well, that's fine, but there's 20 Chinese companies that are already making them, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you're just going to have to get, think about what that means. In the same way, like anything could be fake, Google can't stop that happening, so we're just going to have to get used to…”

“there is that sort of slightly interesting sort of actually quite narrow view in Silicon Valley of what you can and can't copy. Um, and also it's only goes on some axes, even in Silicon Valley. So no one would say like, you know, if you're doing a two-sided marketplace for oilfield workers, instead of doing it for taxi…”

“the sort of text structure in The rest of the world is you tend to have vertical winners. So Google won search, and there's a couple of other people trying to do search. Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-commerce. Facebook won the newsfeed-based thing, and then…”

“never invest in anything called virtual, because it's always going to be like a crap copy of something in the world rather than like a real new thing.”

“the problem is, like, all search grows until you need curation, and then all curation grows until you need search.”

“having privacy, being the privacy company is a huge strategic asset for a large class of the kind of car products that they want to build, because those are products where privacy is actually much more material than it is even on the iPhone.”

“the money that was going to newspapers, a lot of it just isn't spent at all, or it's spent income not on Google and Facebook, but in other places at a 10th or a 100th of the price.”

“I sometimes say that the tech industry has Tourette's and instead of people chatting swear words, they shout like bots or voice or Autonomous cars. Yes. Clubhouse. Clubhouse. Clubhouse. Um, and certainly that's, that's, that's the word of the moment.”

“right now Shopify is, is they're at the tool level. And they're moving, they have a network in the apps, but they have to move up to have a network on the customer side so that, you know, there's a, that creates that much more reason why as a vendor you would want to use that.”

“Clubhouse needs to build a network, otherwise they can't sustain 10%, and of course Twitter has just bought a newsletter company to try and do that for you. Um, and charge five percent instead of 10%.”

“The new thing about TikTok is the swiping and the recommendation. So it's the, it's, it's the, you could call that a network, but it's the mechanics that you build around how you show people what the video is. As opposed to YouTube, which is a basically a very desktop, very like 2005 of course, of course, because it's…”

“unfair comparisons are the only kind that matter. I may have said this when we talked about the, um, talked about charts, because the fair comparisons, they sort of imply that you're playing the same game. It's the unfair comparisons that fuck you up.”

“the theory of Amazon is that everything is an API. Everything is autonomous. Your financial metrics are visible internally. Your business metrics are accessible through an API. So when Germany does shoes, they hire five people, The German shoe team plugs into the logistics API and the e-commerce API, and they don't…”

“you should split e-commerce by the logistics model, not by the product category. That is to say, instead of saying books are totally different from shoes, you should say parcels are different from stuff you have to go and collect, or stuff that has to come to your door in a refrigerated truck, which are also different…”

“there's this cliche that e-commerce has infinite shelf space, and for Amazon it's more that there's one shelf that has infinite length. Everything has to fit on that one shelf. You can't have different kinds of shelves for different things. It all has to be the same shelf.”

“Shopify is like, like the standing rebuke to the idea that Amazon swallows everything. It's a completely different model.”

“the first 50 years of tech, of cars or aircraft were about making car companies and working out what cars are and working out what aircraft are, and the second 50 years was everything that happened once everyone had a car, and everything that happened once air travel was cheapment. Universal. And maybe that's where…”

“Sometimes a hit is just a hit. Sometimes a hit is not the harbinger of a fundamentally new industry structure.”

“It's not Facebook can turn the Facebook messenger into a universal account application that subsumes everything else on the store. It's yes, if you were to work out the right way of adding three things to Uber, that might work.”

“a lot of social media is basically pop culture. I mean, Cameo is pop culture. Is Cameo a tech company? Well, not, not in any meaningful sense. Yes, they've got to execute the tech well, and the site can't crash and the app has to be good. But Cameo is based on an insight into pop culture.”

“there's no such thing as data, because you have to ask, well, what do you mean when you say data? And there's not one answer to that. There's, like, 50 answers to that, and then there's no such thing as data. There's 50 things.”

“Siemens has lots of telemetry data on wind turbines, and General Electric has lots of data, telemetry data on aircraft engines, and Transport for London has lots of touch-in, touch-out data on Oyster cards, and those are all different things, and you can't kind of put them all in a pot and get something else out of…”

“So you have this data that's valuable only in the aggregates of millions of people. Not valuable to the individual user or meaningful in any way to the individual user.”

“I send you a message. Is that your data or mine? It's both, motherfucker. You send me a GDPR. Yeah, someone sends a GDPR request. You have to delete all that data. Yeah, but that's not your data. It's also my data.”

“And so they've always been very, they've always been actually been very asset light in almost all of this stuff. It's only, it's A, retail, and B, chips. Those are the places that they push deep into assets. Because that was where you could deliver something fundamentally different, as opposed to you just doing what…”

“there's a big difference between technology that's hard and technology that's differentiated. And so I think right now what we're seeing in TV streaming TV is that video compression and distribution and getting great streaming video onto your screen is hard, but it's not differentiated.”

“There is vastly more third-party software from vastly more people being installed than ever before on this closed sealed box walled garden.”

“Well, it's a private corporation that controls how billions of people talk to each other. If they decide that billions of people can't say that, that is ipse fact to a free speech question. Doesn't matter that they're not the government or not.”

“Now you could argue that's, that means that you should just break up Facebook, but that just relocates the problem because it's now it's five people collectively who are making that decision instead of one, but the decision is still there.”

“Now, a really obvious one that you see in technology is we want more competition, and we also want more privacy. Okay, so you want to make a new social network, then the obvious competitive tool would be export your friend list and everything they're interested in. Ah, you just described Cambridge Analytica.”

“Controlling Windows doesn't give them dominance of the tech industry, and so what happens is, like, and it's the analogy that I use here, you've built your castle, and it's absolutely impregnable, and sometimes people capture your castle like they Tunnel under the tunnel. They, you know, they, they break down the first…”

“US regulation tends to proceed in criminal cases. They tend to look, they tend to say, did you break the Sherman Antitrust Act of 16, 21, or whenever the hell they passed it? And yes or no, and if yes, then we will do this thing. And 20 years ago, they tried to do this to Microsoft, and in fact, part of the problem of…”

“Yes, people will buy fashion online, but not with a grid of dresses. You need some, you need something about service, experience, discovery, recommendation, all the other sides of what retail are, retail can be.”

“all lists grow until you need search, and all search grows until you need a list.”

“you know the counterfeit is, is really good because it's coming from the same factory as the genuine ones. It's just running it at night as well as a day, so it's not actually a counterfeit. It's only a counterfeit if you're an accountant at Nike. Otherwise it's a shoe. It's a Nike shoe.”

“And then you have Europe where the markets have historically tended to be too small to create global giants. And they've also been easier for global giants to get in. And so in each country you have sort of one or two or three domestic champions that have won that market.”

“we're just seeing systemically more billion dollar, five billion dollar, ten billion dollar software companies because Because the market opportunity is now not selling to 50 CIOs of big companies. It's selling to every CIO and every company and every consumer. And so there will just be vastly more software, vastly…”

“You look at these titles, most of those titles don't have customer ownership and will never get it.”

“all of these services are they all bind you into the phone. And so there is a, you know, just as everything Amazon adds to Prime keeps you from cancelling your Prime account, and that drives every, drives all of your purchases through Amazon. All of these things are sort of ways of making Your next phone purchase be…”

“They're a logistics business as much as they are a technology business. There's lots of cool technology inside Dell as well, but basically they're an assembly business, and which is also what Detroit was, and what Apple isn't.”

“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 five years. And then there's stuff that are kind of…”

“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.”

“Basic fallacy in sort of non-technical people looking at AI in any sense is you see the machine do something, and you think, well, for a human being to be able to do that, they would have to be able to do all these other things. Therefore, the machine must have that capability. And you forget, actually, you're looking…”

“The ideal for a dishwasher, where you don't have to worry about, like, different fabrics, is absolutely, you should just shut the thing and press go, and that should be it, and there shouldn't be any settings at all, and the rest of it should be the chips problem, but there should be no UI.”

“Previously, you'd have the vision of the thing you wanted, and there'd be like a 10 year march to get the technology to build it. Now all the technology is there for almost anything you can think of. And people are trying to work out, well, what is the thing you would create?”

“generally the stuff that, uh, you know, any of the stuff that's a strategy for one company is tactics for other companies. So, you know, Apple's strategy is to have an operating system, and for Apple, Google, that's just a tactic. Google's strategy is to do search. For Apple, that's just a tactic, and so on.”

“And then everything else sits on top of that and is radically decentralized. So everything is a team. There's a team of, like, three people. So shoes in Germany are three people, and makeup in France is four people. And music players, well, pick a category. It's a small number of people, and it's completely atomized,…”

“It's something where it's easier for Apple to create a really great customer experience, because Apple knows what lens and what GPU and what image processing chip is in the phone. Whereas when you are at Android or at Samsung, you've got that kind of disconnected experience where it's not all linked together.”

“Apple thinks about the cloud as dumb storage and Google thinks about the phone as done of dumb glass.”

“we had 20 years of the web browser mouse keyboard, and that was like the monolith for how the internet worked. And now we've broken that apart, and we've got all these different shards all kind of floating around and landing in different places and being juggled and changed and moved around. And Apple and Google every…”

“the smartphone itself is kind of, is a platform for the internet in a way that Windows was not. You targeted the browser, you didn't target Windows, but on the smartphone, you target the smartphone operating system, and it's not neutral. Apple and Google change stuff.”

“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. All, all you'done is just move the problem.”

“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 here that you've got the sort of the underlying physical…”

“an awful lot of this stuff is, um, it's actually smartphone components. I mean, it's obviously like a thermostat or a drone or all of those kinds of things are basically just smartphones with wings.”

“the way that I think about maps are sort of, is that maps are kind of, um, page rank for the real world.”

“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 Facebook.”

“the opportunity that would have topped out at a half billion dollar company 15 years ago is now topping out at a fifty billion dollar company. You know, the scale of the business that it's possible to raise is so much bigger, and therefore the hyper growth period is much, much, much bigger. The period at which you are…”

“that's how you solve the binary problem of the app is installed or it's not installed, because you've got this intermediate layer where content can show up that doesn't have to be the app.”

“the smartphone is a platform, an internet services platform in a way that the PC was not.”

“the fundamental way to understand Google is as a vast machine learning engine and everything that they do is about reach. And they don't really care what the reach is as long as they've got more and more of it.”

“VR is the peace dividend of the smartphone wars. Not that it's peace, but, you know, it's the dividend of the smartphone wars is all these components.”

“I think three D video is really at the kind of pre Eisenstein stage. You know, somebody has actually got to work out, Hey, you can cut, um, And you can move the camera and then start filming again.”

“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, the motivation of anybody who's building a messaging app. That's the last thing they want.”

“And so Apple retail really was a self-funding marketing operation.”

“And so another way of saying this is kind of, you know, the question of what Android is kind of matters to the future of mobile. The question of what iOS is doesn't matter in quite the same way.”

“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 companies like Airbnb or Uber or Lyft, um, where you're…”

“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.”

“It's not that they lose money on anything they do. It's just that all the profits they take, they put into new things. So they spend business profits from yesterday's business on tomorrow's business.”

“to look at the profitability of Amazon, it's a bit like looking at our firm. And saying, okay, well let's add up the P and L of all of the companies that we've invested in. And is it positive or negative? And I don't think that would tell you anything meaningful about how well our portfolio was doing at any given time.…”

“the difference is at some point we have to go back to our LPs and say, well, we're kind of done with that bunch of companies and here's your three or four X return. Right. Whereas Bezos doesn't have to go back to his LPs. People are just willing to let him keep putting, you know, every time, every time he sells a…”

“So they throw that into your Prime subscription, they throw as many things as they possibly can that have no marginal cost other than bandwidth, which is not really the issue, into their, into your Prime subscription. As a way of enticing you into taking out a Prime subscription and keeping it in the first place. And…”

“And if you then turn around and say, well, gee, look, you know, they're spending this much on video content, and they can't possibly be making a profit on that. Well, yeah, they're making a profit by selling you headphones. That's how it works.”

“There's kind of a trade-off between application discovery and feature discovery. That if you've got a simple app, if you've got an application with all of your stuff in it, it's probably easier for you to get people to install that app. But then they're never going to find all of your features. Whereas if you break…”

“what the smartphone did was unbundle the internet from the web and amongst many other things.”

“If you want to make a cool video chat app, you've got a really serious problem. Making it work consistently across Android devices. It will take you twice as long or three times as long as it did to code it on iOS.”

“for Google, all hardware is just kind of dumb glass that links back to their cloud. Whereas for Apple, the cloud is kind of dumb storage that supports their platform.”

“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 the loss leader.”

“In the time of the first internet bubble, you know, a prototypical startup, an archetypal startup, you would have a hundred people, and you'd have raised ten million dollars, and you'd have a million users. And now, you'll have raised one million dollars, and you'll have 10 people, and you'll have a hundred million…”

“So retail rent is money that you spend to reach a customer. It's money you spend instead of marketing or instead of advertising.”

“There's U.S. e-commerce, which is four, five hundred billion dollars, and then there's U.S. retail, but then there's global retail, and then there's global consumer spending. So we go from thinking about a couple of hundred billion dollars to 40, 50 trillion dollars of potential opportunity that really means we've only…”

“when you change how you buy things, you change what people buy.”

“Is that finding patterns becomes a generalizable solution. So is there a cat in this picture becomes the same kind of question as which customers are going to churn, or is that car going to let me merge, or is there something odd happening on our network, or is this customer, um, behaving fraudulently.”

“Now, if mixed reality is at a sort of a 2006 stage, then crypto or cryptocurrencies feel more like a 2000, sorry, a 1994 stage, um, which is sort of where HTML, HTML was sent.”

“the internet lets you buy, but it doesn't really let you shop.”

“And in fact, if you want to find a manufactured product that has the same kind of scale as mobile phones, you really need to look at things like shoes or toothbrushes. There's no other, um, kind of sophisticated manufactured product, certainly no other electronic product that has anything like that kind of scale.”

“It powers wearables and Internet of Things and connected cars and drones and everything else, because fundamentally all of those things are basically smartphones just put together in a different way, but put together by the same people with the same components.”

“On the one hand, the size of the addressable market is increased by an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude. On the other hand, the cost of going to market, the cost of building those businesses, or at least the cost of getting to the first million or two users, has collapsed by several orders of magnitude.”

“And this is something that you see quite often as digital impinges upon old-fashioned industries, that it's first of all digital makes the old product better, and then all of a sudden it creates a new product that kills the old product entirely.”

“And in the same sense, Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are fundamentally enabled by smartphones. They may, they would not be possible without smartphones. They certainly wouldn't be possible without the internet, but they're not in The technology business. They're not selling smartphones. They're not selling a technology…”

“Another way of thinking about this, I think, is that when technology is fully adopted, it tends to disappear.”

“So the archetypal startup in 2000 might have had a hundred staff and a million users. Today it might have 10 staff and ten million users”

“When technology is fully adopted, it tends to disappear.”

“clearly the deployment of mainframes and data processing and spreadsheets and ERPs and so on Did kind of completely change the economics of your business, and that came with a whole bunch of challenges, most of which were really internal management challenges, not operational challenges, not engineering challenges.”

“We'll all get some cost savings out of it and some efficiency gains that will get competed away in price because we're all doing it. And at the end of the day, as long as you don't screw it up, this doesn't change the competitive dynamics. Very much.”

“Jesus Christ, it takes three to six months to get somebody at an enterprise to reply to your inquiry about selling them some software. You know, the enterprise sales cycle is what, 18 months? At best? You know, you want to add a new thing and plug it into SAP and Stripe and Workday and your payment system, uh, we're…”

“all the questions I get are going to fit into two categories. The question, the answer is either no one knows, or how did it work last time?”

“There's a point where you do it in Excel, and there's a point where you buy a thing, because you want to know that somebody's thought about how it should work, and somebody is responsible for it, and will fix it, and there will be bug fixes and security.”

“Slack had a network effect in that, um, One team would use it, and then someone was working with that team, so they would use Slack, and then their team would use it, and then they, so it would kind of spread organically. There were very, very few pieces of enterprise software where that's actually happened, and where…”

“there is a stage in the S-curve in the development of a new, big new technology Where, like, at the early part of the curve, like, it's suddenly very obvious that this is going to be huge, and everyone's very excited, but you don't know how any of it's going to work, and you have to know that you don't know how any of…”

“Because that's kind of what happened with cloud. For example, there's only three hyperscalers, but, and yet like most of the applications are built by other people and most of the value is captured by people who run on AWS.”

“So the more interesting comparison or the more relevant comparison is mobile because mobile does have marginal cost. Like if your mobile traffic doubles, you kind of have to go out and build, not exactly double, but kind of double the infrastructure.”

“power isn't sophistication or complexity or doing clever things or being impressive. Um, power is the ability to make people do something that they don't want to do.”

“And there's a lot of places where corporations are using it to automate some like specific back office process where you're not asking the user to work out what they do with the new tool. Instead, you're saying, okay, here's a problem that we can solve.”

“One of the characteristics of tech is that the moment that you understand something and you know how it works and what's going to happen, Is the moment you should move on to something else, you should always be looking for the quiet places where we don't know what the answers are.”

“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 with the old thing.”

“you go through a platform shift, and the first step of the platform shift is you do the old stuff, but more.”

“Because what generative AI does is it says this is what a good answer probably looks like. This is what most people would probably say. This is how most people would probably make it.”

“And so, you're supposed to, like, Completely re- imagine all of the internal workflows of your company and work out which of them could be automated really quickly with AI. That's a project. That's a project that needs like five or 10 people to sit down and spend a month or two working it out, and then actually doing…”

“Enterprise software sales cycle is like, 18 months if you're lucky. You know, this is always a problem. The enterprise sales cycle is shorter than the, the, the venture backed startup funding cycle. Longer, longer, rather longer. Like it takes you longer to get an enterprise deal than it takes you to go between wraps.”

“the chatbot is a blank screen in a jagged edge. And what am I supposed to do and what will work? And that's a big problem. And the solution to that problem is to wrap it in, in use cases.”

“we don't have breakout a consumer AI apps yet because I think because of marginal cost more than anything else, you can't make it free and get fifty million users and then have a revenue model.”

“there are some cases where internet is not more efficient, like groceries, which is why Walmart is still a giant business, because it's actually more efficient to drive to the supermarket Than it is to deliver all of that product with the cold chain, and the stuff that bruises, and everything else, and deliver that to…”

“The one way this is unquestionably different is that with all the other platform shifts, we knew what the physical limits of the science were.”

“The whole point of a stack is that it's abstracted. Like Cisco didn't get much say in what the websites were, even though it might all have been running on Cisco readers.”

“You have no idea what McKinsey does or what the clients are paying for. They're not paying for the slides.”