Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Famously, Andreessen Horowitz, which had invested in the seed round of Burbn which became Instagram, they did not invest in the Series A because they were [...] and they backed [...]. An interesting thing about this is sometimes it’s driven by a technology. Mobile’s taking off, cameras are finally good enough, it seems like mobile photo sharing is going to be a thing. Other times, the line is less clear on the technology, that it’s more of a social moment has arrived where people are comfortable with where technology is. You can use technology that’s been available for several years to make something happen where there’s a cultural understanding that people are ready. Of course I’m sure Slack and HipChat, there had to be some sufficient advancement in Ajax—I don’t know if people are still calling it Ajax at the time—the ability to have web pages that refreshed without refreshing the whole page. It’s certainly wasn’t like the iPhone shipped and then it made possible this multiparty text communication thing. I think what we’ve seen in our last couple of episodes here on Acquired and we’re going to see here, the really truly huge great companies get built at the Venn diagram intersection of a technology shift, a cultural shift, and a business model shift. HipChat hit the technology shift and they cultural shift, they didn’t hit the business model shift quite right. We’re going to talk about what Slack does here now. Tiny Speck realized, “We got this tool, Linefeed, that we built around IRC. The interface is cleaner, it’s more modern, sort of like HipChat. More importantly, it’s really easy to join.” If you wanted to join in IRC channel, you had to connect to the server. No normal human is going to do that. There are all these benefits of Linefeed and within a week after they’ve got the team jobs, they were like, “Linefeed, we’re going to do that. Let’s make that the product.”…

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