Marc Andreessen: prediction

Transcript context

…But is the key difference easier micropayments? Is the key difference being able to sell collectibles more readily, say, with the NFT model rather than signed T-shirts? They don’t sound very big to me. They both sound like possible advantages, but as a percentage of GDP, they sound like really tiny advantages. Well, it depends on — percentage of GDP, it’s a percentage of GDP — everything is tiny compared to, like, healthcare. The media industry is quite small. If you look at slice of percentage of GDP, it actually turns out . . . It’s actually really interesting — video games, it turns out, is actually quite large, but television, print newspapers have always been a tiny slice of GDP. Magazines have always been a tiny slice. Book publishing’s a tiny slice, but they’re tiny slices that really matter. I don’t really look at it top-down. I don’t really look at it as, okay, this, therefore, has to lead to an expansion of a hundred x in the media business. Maybe, I think, it grows the media business, but it doesn’t have to cause it to explode like that, but having it be a better proposition for creators, having it be a better proposition for consumers, having content come into existence that didn’t exist before. Also, just as you think about scale — scale on these things is really hard to forecast, as it turns out, and the reason is, we live in a world now, very different from the prior worlds. We live in a world where we now have five billion directly addressable consumers online at any moment for any new thing. So, one of the things that we’re finding in our day job is it’s getting really hard to forecast market size for any of these new things. It goes back to, if they don’t have uptake in consumer psychology, then, of course, they’re going to be small, but when these things run, they can really run. Just look at the most recent example, TikTok. Who knew that short-term videos were going to be that big? It just turns out that 5 billion people is a significant percentage that like short-term videos. All of a sudden, it’s this huge business. I think these things are unpredictable in the scope, the scale that they can reach, and I think we might be surprised as to the upside about what happens when you start to make some of these things possible. What prevents a lot of intermediaries from re-emerging in Web 3.0 and making it in some ways a lot like Web 2.0? Which could be okay, but actually recentralized. There are gatekeepers again. There are censorship issues again, and it’s not actually that different, but with marginal improvements? Why isn’t that the scenario?…

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