Ben Thompson: prediction

Transcript context

…So, do we simply have too much venture capital today? You can scale social media and apps. Most things you can’t scale. Venture capital got too happy with the returns from the mobile era, social media era. Now, where’s the next place for them to go? I don’t know that I’ve done this research or whatever to say that. I would be inclined to say no. I think there’s still tremendous amounts of transformation that is going to happen from here on out, particularly things like the cloud and ever-present computing. Basically, everything can be rented, particularly for a technology company. There’s all sorts of things that can be addressed and taken on. A lot of them may be less sexy than a Facebook or something along those lines. But there’s tons of opportunities still to be explored. The era we’re really in is . . . you know, tech spent many years eating itself. You had this sort of Darwinian process where you got these . . . the ones that won out in the end were these really well-executing, super well-funded, tons-of-cash-flow machines. Now they’re kind of turning their eyes out to the general world, and all these industries that used tech but were not fundamentally transformed by tech — they’re just being mowed down. The carnage, I think, is going to be pretty epic when you get into broader industries. Uber and the taxi industry is an obvious example. But I think you’re going to see that happen more broadly, which might be another thing that venture capitalists are underrating. Tech, in general, is all about the heavy investment up front, and then basically zero marginal cost products on the back side. The reality is, as you get more into the real world, those marginal costs become more and more difficult to escape. You need to hire a sales force, right?…

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