David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…Hey. He’s doing great. It worked out for everybody. I’m going to my second one real quick. We’ve also talked about this before but I think really, I put this in here because there was a great quote in that same blog post I referenced earlier that we’ll put in the show notes from, Noam Bardin who was the CEO of Waze and still is from 2009 onward, and the theme is that like entrepreneurship is a global theme now. Silicon Valley is this incredibly special place and has its own network effect and is where the vast majority of startups are going to come, but like, innovation is not a physical location-based thing anymore and Noam puts this great in his blog post. He writes about how Waze was an Israeli company and the important of that. He says, “Growing up in Israel in the '80s and '90s, I lived in a radically different world than my American cousins. We had one channel of black and white TV, music and movies arrived 10 years later, there were no fast food or American brands – we lived very differently.” Then he talks about how “Cable TV started flattening the consumer experience in the ‘90s. The Internet accelerated this change as people globally used Windows PCs and Explorer browsers to surf web sites. Social and platforms have pounded at it again, as today most users have the same Facebook account or Gmail interface and use it very similarly. The final flattening of innovation in the world came from mobile. Anywhere you go in Israel today you will see iPhones and Android Phones, same as in San Francisco, running the same consumer apps and delivering equal joy. On a family vacation with Waze management, it was amazing watching our kids, both Israeli and American, naturally communicate and share apps without the need to speak the same language.” This is like a sea change that’s happening in innovation and we’re seeing stuff like the apps like Musical.ly now that are getting big. It’s based in Shenzen but it's a big social network in America. Yeah, there is still something to be said for density of networks, just the people that you encounter and the people you work around and the speed at which information gets exchanged there.…

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