Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's funny that a few revolutions in the Middle East were organized in the same way that Conan O'Brien organizes tour, just by posting it on Twitter. So this is the thing that got me so convinced on social media relatively early. Even before the Arab Spring, I don’t know if you remember, you might be too young, but there was this overwhelming critique of social media between inception in like 2001 to basically mainstreaming in like, 2011-2012. There was a decade where there was just this overwhelming critique from all the smart people, as I like to say. That was basically — this thing is useless. This is narcissism. This is just pointless self ego stroking, like narcissism. Nobody cares. The cliche always was Twitter is where you go to learn what somebody's cat had for breakfast. Who cares what your cat had for breakfast? Nothing will ever come from any of this. And then I remember, you could pick up any newspaper on any given day through that period and you could read something like this. And then I remember when Erdoğan was consolidating control of Turkey. Erdoğan came out and he said, “I think Twitter is the primary challenge to the survival of any political regime in the modern world,” And I was like — Okay, all the smart analysts all think this is worthless and then a guy who's actually trying to keep control of a country is like, this is my number one threat. The spread of what that meant, of what the outcomes meant. I was just like — “Oh my god.” My conclusion was Erdoğan is right and all the smart westerners are wrong. And quite honestly, I think it’s still quite early on. We’re still pretty early in the long arc of social media. The high level thing here would be — the world in which 5 billion people are on the internet is still only a decade or so old. That’s still really early. The world in which 5 billion people are on social networks is like five years old. It’s still super early. If you just look at the history of these transitions in the past, just look at the printing press as a prescient example. It took 200 years to fully play out the consequences of the printing press. We’re still in the very early stages with these things. I was like ten in 2011 so I don’t know if I would’ve personally. I would’ve liked to think I would’ve caught on if I was older but maybe not. It’s hard to know. But it is kind of interesting. You are personally invested in every single major social media company. So it’s interesting to get your thoughts on where that sector might go. Do you think the next ten years will look like the last ten years when it comes to Big Tech? Is it just going to keep becoming a bigger fraction of GDP? Will that ever stop?…

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