David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…David, why weren’t there? Like there was venture around at this time. Was it all going into internet companies and an MP3 coder with a desktop UI just not splashy enough? Well, yeah. I mean, there certainly was venture at the time. I mean, this was the middle of the tech bubble. But I think a couple of things. Like one, we’re talking about Mac only and that was just a tiny, tiny portion of the market at that point, at least from a VC perspective. And two, I think we’re also just really early in consumerization of the internet. Amazon is around and ecommerce is a thing, Pets.com is a thing and Cosmo and Webvan and all those. But the idea, like there’s no Facebook, there’s no MySpace. The idea of consumers doing things sort of for free and quasi legally, Napster of course is around and AOL has bought WinAmp at this point (which we’ll get into). But for whatever reason, it wasn’t a huge focus area for VCs. Yeah. One way that you can operate as a VC is put on your hat of what’s it going to be, what’s the world going to look like in 5 years, what’s the world going to look like in 10 years, what’s the world going to look in 20 years. And people believed in the digital music revolution which now seems obvious in hindsight but what’s not clear to me is did people beside Steve Jobs who has always had this passion for music and say it's part of Apple’s DNA and part of who they are as a company is loving music. Did other people including technology investors also believe that the digital music revolution was coming? Or did this catch just everyone completely by surprise and that’s why you see no funded companies in the space?…

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