Chris Dixon: belief

Transcript context

…If that comes about, what do you think is the dimension that determines which companies dominate? One argument could be Meta and Elon. They just have a lot of resources. They can be in this for a long time. Another argument is OpenAI has the most powerful brand name with ChatGPT and so on. What’s your commercial intuition on what other factor steps into play? One framing I would say is, if you compare the internet to mobile smartphones. The rise of the internet in the ’90s, the rise of smartphones in late 2000s, early 2010s — both were massively important tech movements. A big difference was with the internet. I would say something like 90 percent of the net new market-cap value went to start-ups, went to new organizations that didn’t exist before the internet: Amazon, Google, and such. With mobile, on the flip side, something like 90 percent — I haven’t done an exact study — went to incumbents. The biggest pure mobile start-up was probably Uber. I think it’s — whatever it is — $150 billion? There was Snapchat. Instagram got bought for a billion, but the vast majority of market-cap value actually went to incumbents. If you look over that, what it did for Apple, Google, Facebook, and all the others, Amazon — they all did fine in that era. They created mobile apps They leaned into it, and their user base went from whatever desktop was at the time — home desktop — let’s call it, 400 million to 4 billion, so 10x. By the way, it’s very hard. Almost no venture firms over the 2010s beat the strategy of buying Apple stock in 2010. Or the Boston Celtics. [laughter]…

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