Riding Waves of Technology | TechCrunch Founding Shareholder Keith Teare

OK, the first thing— so how to succeed. So there's a context. Success is always made possible in a context. So what it would take to be successful, let's say, when I started doing startups in the 1980s, and what it would take today, are different because the context has completely changed. And the most important change in the context is the investing situation, because that's, if you like, your canvas. You have 2 canvases when you do a startup. The first is the world. You're trying to paint something on the world. And the second is, you know, the audience, which in your case, at some point at least, will be investors. You have other audiences as well, but for the purposes of raising money, it's investors. Right. So let's for a minute ignore the first canvas, except to say that the world goes through phases. You could think of them as waves. And if you're surfing on the last wave, not the current one, you're kind of in trouble. And if you don't have a wave at all, you're even in more trouble. And the waves that we've lived through in recent history are You know, the first wave was the computer, the second wave was networks, not the web, just networks. The third, databases. You know, it's weird to say this, but in 1994— in 1984, when I was doing my first company, there was no such thing as a database that could be used by more than one person. Amazing. And people sat at computers, there was no Ethernet, People sat at computers that were not connected to other computers. So you had one database, one computer, one person. So databases and networks, then the internet, before the web. The internet was a particular kind of network that let you plug computers together across the world. Then the web, which I think it's really important to distinguish between the internet and the web. The web was when content was linked together through HTTP. And then Web 2.0 around 2005, when we moved from portals and websites to web services and code in the cloud. And then mobile. And then I think you've got to say from mobile we went almost directly to blockchain. And if you think about some of the common characteristics of all these waves, firstly, they built massive companies, massive companies, because every wave usually kills the prior wave, or at least renders it unable to grow. They don't necessarily die, but they're kind of zombies. Yeah. So every wave creates new value. Secondly, every wave was bigger than the one before in the value it created. Thirdly, at least for the last 3 or 4 waves, it's been global. So if you think about why is TCP as a network protocol different than the network protocol that preceded it, which some of you will know, was called NetBuoy, and there were others. It was because it was truly global. Everyone was linked together. Why, why, if you think about smartphones, there's 2 vendors, Apple and Microsoft, with 2 app stores that get you into more than 200 countries at zero cost. If I tell you that when I did the first ISP in Europe in 1996, I had to get my installer software into the hands of human beings. I had to pay Compaq, which is a company that made laptops, £1 million, those days close to $2 million, just to put my CD in the box of people who would buy a laptop, which you can imagine is not a large number of people. And most of them didn't install it. They thought it was junkware that they should throw away as soon as they got it. So it was a complete waste of money, but there was no good way to distribute software, definitely not globally, but even locally it was hard. So, so the 2 app stores and the smartphones give you a global canvas to distribute on for free. And then with blockchain, you've got global money and transactions pretty much for free. Not exactly for free, but close to for free. So if you think of the canvas that you're drawing on, and it changes as these waves happen. So the very first question for any startup is, what wave are you surfing? And if the answer is, I don't have one, then you need to rethink your product. What wave are you surfing? How— another way of saying the same thing is, how relevant are you to what's happening? If you're doing something that could have been done 10 years ago, you probably shouldn't be looking for venture investment. It may still be a good business. You may— TechCrunch was a great example. What was TechCrunch? It was Michael Arrington. By the way, I technically am the co-founder, but it's worth knowing I was Michael's mentor. I never worked at TechCrunch. It was his thing. I owned a lot of the stock originally because I was the kind of grown-up and he was not. And eventually he owned most of the stock because it was his thing. But what was he doing? He was writing and publishing on a web page. Yeah. It was 5 years of hard work. He certainly deteriorated in health and all kinds of ways through those 5 years, and he exited with about a $30 million outcome. That is not a venture outcome. It's a good outcome, absolutely fantastic outcome for him, but TechCrunch never raised venture capital ever because it wasn't a big enough idea to justify the raise. And insofar as it was surfing a wave, the wave was Web 2.0, but we were writing about it and doing events around it, which is a limited business model. So it was not a big idea. It doesn't mean it was a bad idea. It was a great idea. And today, by the way, TechCrunch has 80 million readers annually. So it's huge, but it doesn't make that much money from those 80 million readers. It's not that big. So what wave are you surfing? Are irrelevant.