Evans: Silicon Valley initially overlooked Pinterest because its userbase was mostly female.
Benedict Evans · The right questions to ask about TikTok · Mar 20, 2023 · at 16:39
Benedict Evans is discussing how Silicon Valley tech culture often ignores consumer social platforms that cater to demographics outside its own male engineering workforce.
0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There was an observation for a long time that Pinterest was sort of like invisible in Silicon Valley, because basically like 80 or 90% of the user pay, it's in New York. Is it New York? I think it's in New York. Yeah. 90% of the users are women. And so like, and it's all about visual collections and stuff. And so if you're like a twenty-five-year-old software engineer in Silicon Valley, you're a man, and you're not interested in any other stuff that people use Pinterest for anyway. And so, like, knowing you're kind of, it was kind of invisible as a social network.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Benedict Evans
Evans: Creators most upset about AI art lack originality
“The really unkind thing one could say is that the people who are most upset about AI art are the people who are making stuff that has no particular authenticity originality. I mean, if you, if you've made, if you wrote 10 vampire romance books last year and yo…”
Evans: The Cambridge Analytica scandal was basically a hoax
“And of course the irony of Cambridge Analytica was it was, in the end, it was basically a hoax. There was nothing there.”
Evans: Skeptics dismissing AI as useless or like NFTs are ignoring reality
“The real idiots are the people who are just saying, oh, none of this works, and it's all nonsense, and it's just a stochastic parrot, and it's useless, and I don't know what it's for and this is all, like, nonsense, and this is a rerun of NFTs. Because these p…”
The DOJ gerrymandered its market definition in the Apple antitrust lawsuit
“The DOJ is suing Apple for having what the DOJ, claiming the DOJ describes as a monopoly of, quote, performance smartphones, which Apple described as gerrymandering, and I'm kind of inclined to agree”