Aaron Levie traces three computing revolutions: mainframes in the 1960s-70s, PCs in the 1990s, and today's cloud and mobile era. Each expanded software's reach from enterprises to billions of users. He argues this democratization of technology makes now the golden age to build foundational companies that can disrupt healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and communications.
Chapters
Because of these trends and because of this transformation, we're seeing the biggest shift in computing that I think has ever existed. And the reason for that is that in each major shift in technology, you tend to sort of expand the market dramatically for potential use cases of technology. So in the 1970s, there were these things called mainframes and minicomputers, and they would take up the size of this room. Sometimes you could get a little bit smaller. And that meant that only businesses that had hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of employees could afford these technologies. And that meant that if you were building software in the '70s or '60s, it was, you know, a very, very limited market. You basically had to work for IBM to be successful. In the '90s, you had this massive proliferation of personal computers and new kinds of devices, and we networked our enterprises together with better client-server networking technology. That meant that we had cool tools like Microsoft that emerged, and Siebel Systems, and PeopleSoft. And these all became billions of dollars worth of value. And it created all new winners in this space. So today, we have the sort of third major shift, which is post-PC, new kinds of devices, all driven via the cloud. And the most exciting part of this shift is that it's going to be reaching billions of people. And if you're building enterprise software, for the very first time you have an addressable market of literally billions of people. Before, if you were building enterprise software, the most number of people you could reach was sort of 300 or 400 million people that had personal computers in their office. But today, with billions of workers that now have mobile devices, it means that if you're building technology for the B2B market, it actually can be used by all these people. If you're building for consumers, there's an even larger market because There's sort of 3 or 4 billion people with mobile phones and you have much larger spaces. But there's going to be this sort of massive transition of the leaders and the vendors of the last period not being able to be very successful in making it to this new era. So this is sort of the right time to be building these foundational companies or these new kinds of products that are going to sort of grow at the rate of and be able to serve all of the sort of new kinds of use cases that are emerging. So pretty amazing time to be building technology. Really probably never a better period in history in terms of the openness, the democratization of technology. So the fact that you can now instantly have distribution channels to hundreds of millions to billions of people, that was never possible before. And all of this comes together to produce a pretty incredible market. So we're going to see basically every single industry change. So if you're— again, if you're building for enterprise, healthcare is going to change, manufacturing is going to Retail's going to change. If you're building a consumer, the way that we buy products is going to change. The way that we obviously communicate is already rapidly changing. And so in basically every single space that exists, there's going to be a new disruptive innovation that emerges, and pretty incredible time for that to happen. So anyway, that's the overview of what we do, how we got to where we are, and where we think things are going. And now I think we can make it a little bit more interactive and crazy.
