Great technologies scale at human level and become foundational blocks whose impact exceeds early expectations. Search wasn't mature when Google started, and social media kept reinventing itself: Facebook gave way to Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Clubhouse. Industries that look played out are usually still in early innings.
Chapters
When technology really works, it scales at the human scale, right? Like, it is like, you know, like great technologies. Whether it's like all the way from fire to the Internet, like, when it's a great building block, the scale of those opportunities and the impact of those primitives oftentimes is way larger than what we think of at the beginning. And so one thing that's surprised me multiple times is industries and markets that I thought were completely played out were just game over. And we were just at the first inning. I mean, actually, like, Google was a great example. I mean, I actually knew Larry and Sergey when they were at stanford doing their PhDs. And I remember actually, like, I knew the person who helped them write their original business plan that they got their first funding from, from Andy Betzelsheim. And I remember hanging out at a barbican and being like, yahoo. So big. There's all these search engines. You know, search feels like it's just over. Like, you know, that game is already played out. Why would you go do search? There's probably so many more interesting dynamic things that are out there. But, you know, search had not even really started at that time. Right. And I feel that happens, like, again and again. And it's happening even in social, right? Like, it felt like, you know, social was over with Facebook and then, oh, no, no, it's actually, there's Instagram and WhatsApp and then, oh, no, there's TikTok and Clubhouse. And like, it's just interesting how these primitives and kind of components, kind of how much longevity and ongoing opportunity there is for innovation.
