How the Internet Happened

With Web3 gathering more momentum than ever before across the tech ecosystem, what can we learn from the recent past of tech adoption? In this episode from December 2018, author and podcaster Brian McCullough talks with a16z general partner Chris Dixon about the origins of the internet, based on Brian’s book, How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  With Web 3 gathering more momentum than ever before across the entire tech ecosystem, what can we learn from the recent past of tech adoption? In this episode from December 2018, author and podcaster Brian McCullough talks with A16Z general partner Chris Dixon about the origins of the internet, based on Brian's book, How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, which covers the beginning of the internet era, now known as Web 1.0, through the dot-com boom and bust, the beginning of Web 2.0, and the advent of mobile with the iPhone. They discuss lessons learned, how innovation doesn't always happen in a straight line, and what the past can tell us about the next phase of the internet, technology, and the future.

• 0:44Chris Dixon?

  Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z Podcast, and today we have Brian McCullough, the author of the recent awesome book, which I just read, called How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone. Thanks for being here, Brian.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Chris.

• 0:56Chris Dixon?

  So I thought it was a really fun book. I guess I had lived through some of it and knew some firsthand and had heard a lot of the stories from some of the principals or sort of secondhand. I'll say first, I really liked the book because as far as everything I knew, which I'd say maybe more than half of it or something from first to secondhand, it was very accurate. And so I just appreciate that.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  No, I appreciate you saying that.

• 1:16Chris Dixon?

  And then number two is really entertaining. It was a great read. I highly recommend reading it. But then the third thing is, you know, I think it's a great resource, especially for younger people who are interested in technology, or I guess, you know, in some ways, everyone might be interested in the internet these days, right? Even if they're not in the technology industry, they probably should be interested in the internet. I just think it's a great resource to have, you know, kind of this, but may become the canonical kind of history of the internet for that period, so.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  The thesis was two-part. I'm thinking of non-tech people.

• 1:42Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  What has been more influential, disruptive? Technology has infiltrated every facet of our life.

• 1:49Chris Dixon?

  More clear than ever in the last few years.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  I feel like anybody would want to know, who did this?

• 1:54Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Why did they do it?

• 1:56Chris Dixon?

  If you like it or not, yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. So, I was thinking, number one, of my parents, and here's how you got a supercomputer in your pocket, all that stuff. But, number two, as we were talking about off-air, about 10 years ago, you know, I'm 40 now, so I started to, when I meet with young entrepreneurs and things like that, they'd start to say things like, "Oh, wow, you were around for the dot-com stuff? What was that like?" So, now, 10 years on, if you're 26, you know, the internet has just always been in the ether all around, so if you're a young entrepreneur entering tech today, I wanted, here is your industry.

• 2:28Chris Dixon?

  Yep.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  And not going all the way back to even the PC era. No. The modern era of web-based startups, especially the modern startups.

• 2:35Chris Dixon?

  The book covers, sort of, Netscape, so 93-ish to, I think, 2007 or so.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  I end with the announcement of the first iPhone, yeah.

• 2:42Chris Dixon?

  And that's important, I think, even if you aren't someone who's interested in history, per se, or whatever, like, if you want to under... I mean, I think I would argue, and I assume you would agree, that if you want to sort of try to predict the future of your industry, you should know where it came from, right? And that gives you a good, you know, gives you pattern recognition.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Pattern recognition, but also, why forget the lessons of the mistakes?

• 3:03Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. Learn from the mistakes, yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Why forget the things that failed? When you go into the dot-com era stuff and those chapters, you're seeing all the things, like grocery delivery, like cloud computing, cloud storage, and things like that, that were always good ideas, but seemed like the most boneheaded, wrong ideas at the time, because it was just too soon.

• 3:22Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  So, there's so many lessons, all throughout the book, of not just, why did this thing work and that thing didn't, but why did that thing not work then? And does it work in other contexts? And learning those patterns, I think, are the most valuable.

• 3:36Chris Dixon?

  I have this, I always forget the name of it, I gotta look, it's on eBay, but it's a card game from like 2005. I think it was like Dot Bomb or something, but it's, it was a joke, because at the time, it was, of course, the internet had sort of become a joke, and it was, the cards were each all the, it was bad idea cards, and it was like, internet grocery delivery, internet money. It was funny, because I actually wrote a blog post about this, it's somewhere, where it's almost like all of the companies that are sort of the hot companies today in technology. Were these quote unquote bad ideas.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:04Chris Dixon?

  Which I think the lesson is, I think Marc Andreessen said this, like, there are no bad ideas. They're just ideas that are too early.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:10Chris Dixon?

  Right, I mean, and you saw it all happen in that kind of primordial soup of the 90s.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  And so that's also, there's a built in fun narrative there, which is you have the web going mainstream. And so you have this sort of like Cambrian explosion of technology and companies. And then the asteroid hits and the dinosaurs are dead. And then the rebirth. So like seeing that, like, so maybe that is the more important lesson than individual ideas that don't work. But being in an industry that is prone to occasionally on a cycle, everything's gonna blow up. And so how do you and your company and your idea survive that sort of a cycle?

• 4:45Chris Dixon?

  It's hard to describe to people who didn't live through it, how the internet looked 2001 to, let's say, four, like pre-Google IPO, I guess.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:52Chris Dixon?

  And you talk about it in the book, before people realized, like, and it was, you know, it was clear, people, like, it was an important thing. People would use it, you know, although nothing like today, you didn't have smartphones and everything. It would be more like the thing, you go home, you check your email, like, it's this nice way to send pictures to your family. So it's clearly like a useful thing 2001 to 4, but it, but the assumption was, it's one of these things like the airline industry or something that'll just never make money. Right? It was a cool thing, cool tool, we're using it, but man, was that a bad idea from a business perspective?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:17Chris Dixon?

  And that was the sentiment. And then Google, I remember Google's sort of, you know, their IPO and then a bunch of other.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Do you remember the first time you heard how much money Google was making? Cause I remember so many people's reaction to that, because that was the thing, is that everyone had been conditioned to think

• 5:31Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That while the internet was fun, it was probably a niche, and you were never going to be able to build a truly great company on top of it. And then all of a sudden, cause they kept it secret for so long, I remember people's reactions, just their jaws dropping.

• 5:43Chris Dixon?

  And I think, as I recall, I joined the industry and there were sort of all these other kind of green shoots. You saw, you know, if you were in the industry, you started to see, wait, that person, you know, they're supposed to be a terrible thing and they're making two, couple hundred million.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of them, yeah.

• 5:53Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, so, yeah, they were absolutely like Flickr and Delicious, and there were all these cool products, but also there were Zappos and PayPal and a bunch of other companies were actually still kind of going, and they weren't Google, but they were, you know, they were real businesses. So anyways, let's go through some of the chapters of the book. So I think what particularly interesting thing is in the early stage of the internet, there was this kind of, I think one thing people don't realize today is the kind of bottom up. Decentralized architecture of the web, there was an alternative to it. Known as the information superhighway. Being pushed by companies like, I believe you know better Comcast, Disney, Microsoft.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Well, they were all planning to get together and make, you know, there was a million plans, a million meetings. And I say in the book, you know, Bill Gates took meetings with all in sundry from Barry Diller to whoever.

• 6:35Chris Dixon?

  So the point being though, that there were plenty of people who just didn't believe in the internet. And then among the people that did.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  I don't think that's it. I don't think that's it.

• 6:41Chris Dixon?

  Okay.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I don't think anybody, even the people that eventually became internet true believers, thought that it was good enough. That's, I think, the lesson.

• 6:49Chris Dixon?

  Okay, okay, sorry. So I guess, let me rephrase it. I think there was some camp of people that just weren't excited by the idea of networking computers.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Right, sure.

• 6:56Chris Dixon?

  Then there, of the people that wanted to network computers globally, there were people that thought the best way to do it would be in this kind of centralized way.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 7:04Chris Dixon?

  With, you know, putting a big box by your TV.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:07Chris Dixon?

  With a big fat pipe and, you know, and sort of a TV kind of top-down experience controlled by Comcast, Disney, Microsoft. And then there was sort of this really kind of unlikely alternative, which was this, at the time, pretty crappy experience in Mosaic and, you know, homebrew websites and Yahoo, and you talk about this, you know, in the book. But like, and I think, I don't know, I think that was sort of the, at least, let's say 93 or 94, probably still the underdog.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, certainly.

• 7:34Chris Dixon?

  You know, that, right, that approach. And the fact that, versus AOL and all these other companies, you know. And the fact that that ended up winning, like, what's the lesson there? It's a very interesting story.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  The lesson, we're almost saying it, it's obvious, the lesson is sometimes just good enough technology.

• 7:48Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Is good enough. So like, again, Bill Gates and Barry Diller, all them, they weren't wrong. They believed that broadband was gonna become.

• 7:56Chris Dixon?

  So they were trying for perfect too early and just good enough was better?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  They knew it was gonna come 2002. They weren't wrong. That's the date that broadband started to penetrate and things like that. So they thought they had time. Was the key essence and they thought that, okay, we'll all play nicely together. We'll all take our piece of the pie or whatever. So it's classically out of nowhere from the bottom up. Like you're saying, it was almost like the PC too, because it's hobbyists that want to do this thing. So people see the early web and you know, pictures are enough. Little postage sized videos are enough to do cool things at the beginning.

• 8:28Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Now then you have the crazy people that come on top of that and say, can I do commerce on top of this? Can I build an actual business on top of this? But what you need first is you need the technology to be good enough to excite a sort of like enough people to accept the limitations of the good enough technology. And then if you reach a critical mass there, then you can at least build businesses off those early adopt.

• 8:52Chris Dixon?

  But I would also, maybe I'm promoting my own view of the world here too much, but I would also argue it's very important that the people that are excited in the beginning are also people like who are able to build websites.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:01Chris Dixon?

  And or build code or write client or do whatever, like the fact that a lot of them were software developers or computer enthusiasts, right? And so like the same with the early PC, like you didn't just want people to use it. You want people to write spreadsheets and word processors and do all that stuff, right?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And so for that, we have to credit Berners-Lee, of course, because not only does the web bring sexiness to the internet. The internet had been around by 25, 30 years at that point, but the pictures and the things and the cat videos like that gets normal people involved, but Berners-Lee and HTML is so dead simple that you have to only be minimally sophisticated to be able to develop for it, right? And so we have to give them credit.

• 9:35Chris Dixon?

  Him and then also the academics and other people who made DNS, for example, like the fact that it was permissionless. The fact that a hobbyist and a university could be on sort of level playing field with Disney on the web, right? And like put up a website and.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  So it's that sort of chicken and egg thing where people see the web for the first time in the mosaic browser because it's easy to use because you can get it on Windows. And they say, I want to create a cool thing like what I just saw. And so it's easy for them to go off and create that cool thing. It's right, you need both sides of that.

• 10:02Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I see. So you need sort of the one side that kind of inspires people and gets them fired up. And the other side that lets them then go.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  The obvious analogy to think of today is like VR is still, it's not only can you not get mainstream people to adopt it, but it's still relatively difficult and you have to be super sophisticated to create decent VR experiences.

• 10:23Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, makes sense. Okay, so there's that. So to me, that that beginning part was really interesting, the sort of top down, bottom up battle. And in fact, like, I think you had in the book, I'd seen this before, but Bill Gates's first version of his Road Ahead, which came out in, what, ninety-five or something?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Ninety-four-ish.

• 10:37Chris Dixon?

  Ninety-four-ish, didn't, it barely had the web in it, and then they actually revised a version.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Suddenly had a hundred and fifty.

• 10:43Chris Dixon?

  But it did have information super high, it did talk about network.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Right, right, and so that's, that's the only thing, I'm not calling Bill Gates stupid at all in the book. He had the vision, he just bet on the wrong horse because he thought that it was too nerdy for normal people to adopt.

• 10:57Chris Dixon?

  Interesting. And then you talk about a bunch of interesting, obviously, sort of the canonical, the iconic companies, I guess, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, eBay. Amazon. Amazon. eBay is an interesting one because I think of the, you know, well, they're all interesting, but obviously, Google and Amazon are wildly powerful companies today, you know, Yahoo, of course, had its sort of fall and was kind of replaced by Google. I think eBay is interesting because, you know, they're still an important company, they're a big company, but we don't think of them as, or they're not sort of GAF, they're not the four big ones, but from a product point of view, I think you argue, in some ways, could be the most influential internet company, and in some ways, the truest internet company.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  And I was surprised that I discovered that in writing the chapter, I knew I was gonna write about eBay, but, so there's three things that they do that I argue are super influential and they deserve more credit for laying the groundwork for this. Number one, they teach normal people to trust faceless strangers from across the country online, right? When I was doing the library research for this, as late as like the Christmas of ninety-eight and ninety-nine, people are wondering if e-commerce is ever gonna take off because they can't convince enough people to put their credit cards online, like, we're gonna completely through the looking glass world now in terms of that sort of stuff. But, so the fact that eBay trained normal people, that you can trust faceless masses, we should not underestimate the people that were the training wheels for the modern digital era. And so just doing something like that is key.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  The second thing that is key is that, like I said, these are masses that are self-organizing. And so, like, we live in the tyranny of the five-star rating system, how would Uber, Airbnb, go down the list? They created, or they proved that a non-hierarchical, sort of self-organized reputation system could function online, maybe not perfectly, but well enough to achieve scale to be good enough most of the time.

• 12:45Chris Dixon?

  Did eBay invent that or popularize it? There must have been a concept in like, you're back from like the Usenet or something days.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I'm sure, of course, they did not invent it, but the story is, is that-

• 12:53Chris Dixon?

  They certainly popularized it. They certainly made it mainstream.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Right. Pyramid AR did not want to have to settle the disputes between users, so he just created a system out of laziness that was like, alright, you can accrue reputation, and if you don't defend that reputation, it's gonna harm you. And so that was actually one of the key reasons that they, because Amazon came after them, Yahoo Auctions came, you know. People, once they invested in that reputation system enough, they're not gonna go to the other platform, right?

• 13:18Chris Dixon?

  So trust people on the internet.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  The rating system. And then the third one is just the fact that, and I do argue this, maybe around the edges, there are others, but they were the first company to succeed at, our business model is just whatever our users are doing on our platform. And I tell the story in the book that like Jeff Skoll is, the newspapers were not dumb, no matter what anyone says, they were kicking the tires, they knew that this was a threat to their classified ads business. But one of the guys says to Jeff, my C-suite's not gonna sign off on buying you because you don't own anything, you don't own trucks, you don't own factories, and that's common throughout the digital era, but also, they couldn't wrap their minds around the fact that, like, you're not even taking possession of the goods. All you're doing is letting people interact, right? And so, again, where would social media be? Some of the most powerful, valuable companies in the world don't own anything.

• 14:05Chris Dixon?

  That's precisely why they're so valuable, because that, it turns out, that's a very profitable thing.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Exactly, right.

• 14:10Chris Dixon?

  You don't have to deal with all the, right, the inventory and everything else. It's funny, you still see that on like Twitter, people are like, you know, how could Uber be more valuable than, I don't know, What Hurts or something? They don't own things, and it's like, well, it's not, that's actually a feature, not a bug, from a P and L perspective. That's interesting. So, I guess some other interesting ones, so Napster, that was one I learned a little bit more, I mean, I knew this public story, but I never really knew the sort of story.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  That's another one where I discovered what that was about while doing it, because, and we all think Napster, it's about piracy, it's about disruption of a media industry that can't get with the times quick enough and was dug their heels in stubbornly, but no. And I got this by interviewing some of the Napster guys, where they're making their case, and then when you do the research, you see their quotes from 1998, 99, they're screaming this from the rooftops. The story of Napster is- Today, we live in a world for media of unlimited selection and instant gratification. If I tell you about a TV show, movie, book, whatever, we just did that with our phones. You expect to be able to pull it up in five seconds and at least sample it or probably consume it, right? That's what they had.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  And had they been able to convince anyone of that in 1999, it would be a completely different media landscape. And the only problem that they had is, you know, don't pick a fight with an industry that has literal mob ties, going back to its very founding days.

• 15:25Chris Dixon?

  That's the interesting thing is, it's sort of a three acts. To me, it's a three acts play, right? So, the first act is Napster does this, and everyone says they're instigating piracy. And the second act is, okay, we shut them down, we got rid of the pirates. And the third act is, it turns out, in a way, they were right all along. It wasn't about getting things for free, it was about the convenience. And Steve Jobs said the same thing, but like, right? In the end, it turns out, like today, that there's like, very little, you know, I mean, there's music piracy, and there's movie piracy, and there's video game piracy, but for the most part...

• 15:52Speaker 02

  If you make it simple enough and have a reasonable price...

• 15:54Chris Dixon?

  That's right. So, it turns out, we now know that their value proposition actually was, as they claimed, a great deal of it was about convenience and not about stealing.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  100%. And so, you know, the direct analogy is Spotify, right? You could have had a Spotify in 1999 or 2000, at the very least. This is, again, classic disruption stuff. You can't convince an industry at the height, you know, 1999, I think, is the height, and they're doing $20 billion because of the CD format, and that's all that classic stuff. But at the same time, you know, there's other reasons why Napster didn't work out. They couldn't attract the best talent, and the legal stuff happened from day one, but...

• 16:31Chris Dixon?

  Didn't they also get displaced by, like, Nutella and all these, or more like, or what was it, Kazaa?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, like, let's say that the record companies had been willing to at least play ball a little bit and do tests with them as a platform, right? Think of the counterfactual there. Where would, if Apple launches the iPod, how does that eventually gain traction, other than being something that, then, if Napster is popularized, is just, you know, an accessory to Napster, right? And then, you know, if that model had been proven, who's to say that they wouldn't have been the ones to go, because it's the next obvious thing, to video streaming and things like that? So, you know, Netflix had the road open to them because there was no one else doing it, but like, there could have been a player already there that had proven success through this model and would obviously have gone into video.

• 17:16Chris Dixon?

  And that, then, when YouTube and Netflix came along, the movie... And TV folks, industries had seen what happened to the music industry and were savvier this time, right?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Number one.

• 17:27Chris Dixon?

  Instead of just sort of saying, let's just fight it tooth and nail, maybe we can make it work for us.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Number one, they trust Google to have the math to at least take down the piracy enough.

• 17:36Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Number two, Google had already proven AdWords and was making, you know, billions of dollars a year at these little contextual ads. And so, Google can come to the table with them from day one, once they own YouTube, and say, hey, there's money here. Do you want a piece of this? So, as opposed to Napster, which didn't have that built out. So, they're begging the record companies to come to their platform that they're gonna build, they haven't done it yet, but they don't have in place any monetization. So, from day one, once YouTube is under Google's wing, Google has at least something. It wasn't what they wanted, it wasn't gonna replace their existing business models, but something was better than nothing.

• 18:11Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. So, it's like about Google a little bit, so I think, to me, there's many remarkable things about Google, but perhaps what's most remarkable is the business model, which kind of, in like the most serendipitous, like, confluence events in history, right? You create the most popular, I mean, you sort of, you think, what went, I mean, they're brilliant, of course, and invented all this amazing stuff, but they build this incredibly valuable search engine, I mean, incredibly effective and useful. Um, you know, the web, of course, explodes in use, in value, and broadband, and smartphones, and all that. But then, this company called Overture, GoTo originally, and then Overture, for sort of completely, a little bit orthogonal reasons, invents the greatest business model of all time, which happens to tuck perfectly into Google's model.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  I just gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at Google, it posted recently, and I said to them, I was like, I don't know how to say this here, but, um, obviously, you guys, your first miracle was you solved search, God bless, how can we function today without that? Your number two miracle is that you created the greatest advertising machine ever devised by humanity, but actually, you didn't create, you kind of stole it. They didn't steal it, somebody else, somebody else invented it, because they actually made it functionally better.

• 19:18Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  You know, that's the Google story. There's no problem that they don't think that they can do better.

• 19:22Chris Dixon?

  The quality score stuff.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Right, exactly, yeah. Right, so.

• 19:25Chris Dixon?

  And they had, they had great, like, GoTo didn't ever had great organic results, they just had results, it was just a pure option.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  GoTo was a pure pay-for-play thing.

• 19:31Chris Dixon?

  It was like, for people today, it's like just the SEM without the SEO.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:35Chris Dixon?

  It's just the right rail without the left.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  And then, like, that, that original model, because again, I, I built one of my first companies purely on AdWords. So, imagine this perfect three-sided market where, as an advertiser, I'm paying less per click. If my ad is more relevant, because I remember like I I used to be paying $2 or whatever over on GoTo and all of a sudden I'm paying 30% to click because my ad is better and as it gets better, it goes down. The Google's making more money because they know that someone might be bidding a dollar but only be clicked on a certain amount of times. If you bid 5 cents but get clicked on 30 times, we make more money. And they did those, they did that actual A B testing where it's like the users actually preferred the ads.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Because if the organic results are good, yeah, maybe these paid results also might have some benefit, you know, for certain use cases. So people actually searched more once they put the ads up. So it's the perfect three sided market where it's win, win, win.

• 20:28Chris Dixon?

  Well, the other fascinating thing, right, is all of the pressure at the time was around. So that everyone thought the only possible business model for search was sort of the portal model, which was to have, you know, banner ads. And so surrounded by celebrity news and all.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  It's the classic eyeballs attention.

• 20:41Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, and so, and so there was all these famous stories, I think it was, was it Excite with George Bell or something where they were, you know, and I'm not taking, I don't, I'm not criticizing these executives at all because like that was the business model at the time. But the whole thing was I don't want a search engine that's too good that gets them off my site because that destroys my business model. So like the other brilliant thing that Larry and Sergey did, right, beyond everything else, was stick to their principles with kind of crazily, right? With no business model at all in sight.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  And as I point out in the book.

• 21:08Chris Dixon?

  And we're going to go against the entire industry and we're going to just bet that a business model will come along that's going to work. Even though everyone says it's not going to.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Their investors have said publicly that we were starting to get a little itchy, like, like, are you guys ever gonna?

• 21:21Chris Dixon?

  Well, they had this whole real, this sounds crazy today, but they had a real effort to do, they were going to sell Google boxes. Which were this enterprise search, because everyone knew consumer had no business model.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:29Chris Dixon?

  And there's like, I remember there's a great business we got from like 2000, like, you know, awesome search engine. How will they ever make money? You know, one of these like pipe dream Silicon Valley things. And they literally, it was like, well, we'll sell a box, it's $100,000, you put it in your data center, it collects your corporate documents.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  They were still manufacturing those as recently as two years ago, by the way.

• 21:46Chris Dixon?

  Is that right?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  I think they only recently shut that business down.

• 21:48Chris Dixon?

  They probably felt bad because someone bought them and you had to support it, I don't know. Anyways, so that's an amazing story. Well, I don't know, what, you tell me, like, what other, I mean, there's a. A whole bunch of great stories.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I fought hard, as we said, to preserve the stories of the dot com bubble because I think for our industry, it's key to remember.

• 22:07Chris Dixon?

  So like you mentioned the bad side of the bubble.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  The bad side.

• 22:10Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, let's talk about that. So you're talking about just the froth and the bad companies and the whole kind of hysteria.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so part of it is excusable by the fact that, you know, any new technology is a lot of entrepreneurs feeling around in the dark to see what actually works.

• 22:26Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  But this was more so than most because no one knows anything. No one knows if you can successfully do commerce on the internet at the beginning. No one knows, like.

• 22:35Chris Dixon?

  I think of it as like you're searching on more degrees of freedom than normally. Normally, you're looking for like what's a good product. Here, you're just trying to figure out what's a good product, what's a good business model, what's a good, like, just so much was unknown.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  When you invent the internal combustion engine, you have a pretty good idea you're eventually going to move people and.

• 22:49Chris Dixon?

  That's right, that's right, okay.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  But no one even knows, it's like that analogy of the elephant, like you're looking at the elephant, somebody sees a tail, somebody sees a toe. Like, no one really knows what they're looking at. And so I don't, a lot of the fun excess and things like that, I don't blame the people involved at all because no one knew. And anybody that tells you from that time, oh, well, we were successful because we. No, come on. It was just random chance in a lot of cases. Proven out by the fact that the vast majority of them were e-commerce plays, right?

• 23:19Chris Dixon?

  Well, I think the way you describe in your book is, so you sort of have, I don't remember the years exactly, but like 95 ish, you have some like high-quality companies, 96, it's more of that. At some point, maybe 99.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  98 is when it turns.

• 23:30Chris Dixon?

  You get cynical. At some point, you do get the sort of the hucksters and the cynicism and just like pure, you know, business plans, IPO. And so I think, I think there's like, right, so there's, so there's the great companies that survived. There's the really well-intentioned, good ideas that just didn't happen to make it. And then at some point, there is this sort of cynical.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Because there's the quotes from the VCs in there, number one, where they're like, we don't have to back a successful company because all we got to do is get it out the door and get it public, right?

• 23:57Chris Dixon?

  Well, and the way capitalism works is like, maybe there are VC, I assume there were VCs who were really trying hard. To find companies that would really work long term, but eventually if they just, if their neighbor is doing the cynical strategy and winning, the, you know,

• 24:09Speaker 02

  It's the classic bubble, the greater fool, like, can I, can I get out while the getting's good before those guys get out while they getting's good? But also then, you know, it's not just the VCs, because Wall Street had so much, and not just Wall Street itself, but like, as I point out in the book, like, this is, historically, these are the baby boomers reaching their peak earning years, and they're gonna, that money had to go somewhere.

• 24:32Chris Dixon?

  So almost independence of the internet, you would have had some, you would have had some, it was, it was, it was a ripe era for some of that.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Maggie Mayhar, the journalist from Barron's in the book, I quote her, she said something like, yeah, if, someone would have had to invent this. It was the froth on the cappuccino of the, of, the longest bull market in history.

• 24:48Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  You know, going back to 82.

• 24:50Chris Dixon?

  So, yeah, let's talk, let's more about the, see, that kind of the frothy sort of craziness there, right?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  So many times in this book, so many of the ideas that seemed dumb at the time, prove out later, because they were just too soon.

• 25:02Chris Dixon?

  Yep.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  There was a startup, I think they might have been public in the late 90s, called Myspace, but it wasn't the social network Myspace, it was literally, you would put a widget on your desk.

• 25:13Chris Dixon?

  It was Dropbox.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  It was Dropbox, right. Store your files in the cloud, right? But, you know, this is in the era of dial-up, Wi-Fi doesn't have, there's, there were so many things, one of the most notorious dot-com era flameouts is Webvan, which is grocery delivery, right? The story of the, the pets dot-com and all of, there was, there were four to five major pets e-commerce plays, and they couldn't find ways to economically ship dog food. Now, again, that's a classic story, but obviously, that's a problem that's been solved now. So, in a way, this is always true, again, in tech, but any technology, like, there are ideas that'll always be bad ideas, and then there are ideas that are only bad ideas because of certain...

• 25:59Speaker 02

  The technology's not there yet, the market's not there yet, the public's not there yet.

• 26:02Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  So, there's a lot of those stories in the book and I wanted to preserve that. I wanted to also show even ideas or people that swing and miss in certain eras. Why do they come back? What are the lessons that... Because it's not like, well, boy, I...

• 26:17Chris Dixon?

  What are some good examples there?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Frankly, things like the on-demand delivery stuff.

• 26:22Chris Dixon?

  Okay.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Because there was Cosmo here in New York City.

• 26:24Chris Dixon?

  Oh, so you're saying the... Okay, I thought you meant the very same people. You're saying just trying the same ideas.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I'd have to think about it a bit, but there are... Mark being a perfect example, you know? But the idea that you wouldn't hunker down and wait on your idea to... No one knew at the time you needed smartphones to get the on-demand delivery

• 26:42Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  piece of the puzzle to work. But it's not like people hunkered down and waited. A lot of the people went in different directions. The people that were successful, like a lot of the people that founded PayPal, you know, came from other dot-com stuffs that they either flipped and sold or IPO'd or whatever. But then they didn't keep going with those original either e-commerce players or whatever it was that they did. Like, what was Zip2? It was like a directory or something like that. They went in a different direction.

• 27:09Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  So like, I wanted to track like that sort of development on the specific personal story level, too.

• 27:14Chris Dixon?

  Where do you think... So, maybe just switching gears here a little bit, but like, where do you think we are? When you write that... You must have thought a lot about this, I assume, when you wrote the book. Like, so you wrote about that era and then you can imagine a follow-up book from like 2007 to today, which I'd kind of call a smartphone era, I assume.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:30Chris Dixon?

  Where do you think we are now? Like, do you think this is the internet? And now, I mean, obviously it'll get better and improve, but like, that was sort of it? In the same way that, like, well, you wrote a book about the automobile industry, right? You write about... You sort of... The equivalent of your book would be covering, I don't know what, 1901 to 1915 or something, right?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:46Chris Dixon?

  And then after that, okay, you get more makes and models and they get faster and this and that. But fundamentally, you know...

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:52Chris Dixon?

  Or, I don't know, maybe not. Maybe in the automobile industry, you could argue that stage two was about building suburbs and trucking companies and, you know... So that would be sort of the story of history. Like, where are we? I just... I always think about this. I don't know the answer, obviously.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  If I'm being honest...

• 28:02Chris Dixon?

  Where are we in the 100-year story?

• 28:03Speaker 02

  If I'm being honest, where we are right now today, my original answer was going to be almost what you're saying, is that we're sort of in a lull, okay? So I said, like, you know, the original dot-com era is this Cambrian explosion. That tended to have sort of a flavor towards commerce. And then in the Web 2.0 era, you have this more here comes everybody sort of thing where the web and technology itself becomes more bidirectional, where people aren't just passively consuming, they're also creating.

• 28:30Chris Dixon?

  This is Web 2.0, I think that's Clay Shirkey's phrase, which is sort of this idea of like Wikipedia and Facebook, whatever, of just sort of this bidirectional, instead of just...

• 28:37Speaker 02

  By just turning the knob a little bit, that shades into social, right? And then when mobile, mobile is essentially a rise at the same time that social goes mainstream. And it is serendipitously the perfect consumption and crucially creation device for social, right? So would social have got as far as it had had the iPhone not arrived at the exact same moment? It's within the same 18-month period that Facebook opens open registration and the iPhone is released and things like that. But I think that's a crucial thing to remember, is that it's not just the perfect consumption device, it's the key device for actually creating all that social stuff. Back to your original question. I actually think we're in a lull right now, if I'm being honest.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  That, remember what it was like, you know, as late as even 2012? Where it was like every couple of days, you'd be like, what's this new thing now? Do I have to be on this? Do I have to try this? Do I need this gadget or whatever? And, you know, aside from all of the other, you know, things about tech right now and people maybe feeling bad about the tech industry generally, I also think that what's not helped is that there hasn't been that new wow factor. And I don't know what that is.

• 29:48Chris Dixon?

  Are we in a lull, or is the internet like TV and now we have CBS, NBC, NBC?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Is that a symptom of maturity?

• 29:55Chris Dixon?

  And then it's just, yeah, or is it, I guess, so I agree we're in a lull now, but I, and I personally, I'll just say, my own bias would be it's a lull and it will un-lull or whatever. But another argument, you know, I think if you've read Tim Wu's book, I think it's called Master Switch. It's a really good book. But he basically argues this is just sort of all forms of media. You get mature, you have four big incumbents, and then you, the government either breaks them up or doesn't. Like, is that, is that where we are, or?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  I think so for at least the existing players. But I think the other thing where we are right now is-

• 30:28Chris Dixon?

  Or, or is software technology have a different dynamic? I guess that's what I'm, I, I, you know, I'm getting, I guess, sort of, I'm sort of hinting at my view, which is I think software is a little different than hardware in that way, but-

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Because this is more what I, on my daily podcast that I've been talking about a lot lately, is that another symptom of what we have right now is that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit picked. Like, when mobile takes off, you can be a 16-person team, code up a new, better, slightly different chat app, and have a billion users. So, we were in this great period of a decade, the better part of a decade, where everybody can chase a billion users, right? Well, most of those categories have been filled. I mean, arguably, anyone could come around tomorrow and do something slightly differently and, and take over anybody's place in any of these things. But, because all anyone was chasing was scale, all that mattered was getting to that scale.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  And I think that what we're waiting for now is that it is sort of like the market where it was just the Model T, and you could only get it in black, and there was only- What we need to see this next generation develop is that it's, it's about not just the quantity, or not about the scale, it's about the quality. Like, the way that you'll differentiate and become the new Instagram, and become the new, what I'm using mostly chat apps right now as the example, but is to provide a qualitatively better experience. And I actually think that that will create more interesting startups, because it's not just you show up here, plant your flag in this market, and reach a billion users. If you're gonna reach a billion users now, you have to offer something qualitatively different than what other people are doing.

• 32:03Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I guess the question I have is, so that, I think the historical pattern in tech has been sort of this interaction between what's called infrastructures, and people call it platforms, but I think it's infrastructure and applications, right? And so, infrastructure in my mind is computers, the internet, right? It's sort of, you know, broadband, smartphones. Applications are the word processor, Mosaic.

• 32:23Chris Dixon?

  Ebay, you know, websites, Instagram, things like that, right? And I think, you know, you mentioned low hanging fruit. What happened right there was the iPhone was this major new unlock kind of for a new wave of infrastructure, right? So then, and then, and people suddenly have this, you're holding this thing in your hand, you got a camera, you've got this awesome screen, what am I going to do with it? You're sitting there looking for apps, you don't have that many on your screen, you know, now it's saturated, right? And so then, and I think the history has been that the lull is due to the fact that now, you know, the iPhone is 2007, the App Store 2008, so we're 10 years into this cycle, right? And so it's sort of, people have, entrepreneurs have picked off all the low hanging applications. And, but then, but then, either we're at the end of history, or something new comes along, I don't know, you know, we have all these candidates, and maybe it's a new kind

• 33:08Chris Dixon?

  of device, maybe it's cars, maybe it's VR, maybe it's blockchain, maybe it's machine learning stuff, maybe it's whatever, I don't know what it is. And, and that thing then creates a new piece of infrastructure that unlocks 10 years of innovation, or we're at the end of history.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  We're not at the end of history, because what I think, another thing, and I'm not blaming entrepreneurs for this, but people are still doing the same playbook that people have been doing since 2004, since the first time that you could achieve a billion users with a product, right? And so, what I'm saying is, is what maybe we're also waiting on is for that next generation to come up behind and be like, well, we're doing it this way because this is the way it makes sense to us, as opposed to maybe especially these last couple of years, people are still trying to hit from the same playbook. And that's not what happened.

• 34:00Chris Dixon?

  Okay, so you're saying less, a new piece of infrastructure, and more just a new kind of cultural shift.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  And I'll tell you why. Because think about it, like, when we were talking about when the dot com bubble burst, and like, well, people think it's a fad and this is over, but the people that still believed it, they, people were still using it, they were still using it to do cool stuff, right? And so, they weren't trying to, it's not like everyone, because they had the example of the whole dot com thing blowing up, so they weren't gonna do that playbook. That playbook was dead and over, so they were freed to go off and do crazy ideas, right? So it's almost like we're being held back by the fact that we have been so successful in tech, and tech has taken over the world, and so people are trying to follow that model that has been so successful for everybody else. It would almost be useful if we had a couple blowups, so that people would be freed up

• 34:50Speaker 02

  to think differently, and also, crucially, Be brave enough because again, when Flickr gets started, like it's no other like this is cool like I can I want to find all photos of the Grand Canyon and users will do this for us with taxonomies and tagging and like so like and then we'll find the business model later whereas everybody is still again trying to play from that Instagram and get to a billion users and get to scale playbook.

• 35:13Chris Dixon?

  I think what probably will happen is some at some you sort of have these archetype companies come up who show a new playbook, right? So you mentioned Flickr and those and Delicious and those things in the kind of web two era and we were talking earlier about eBay that kind of paved the way for a lot of that stuff. I think there's been a like right now at least what I'm seeing in the industry is there's a lot of stuff happening on in enterprise software. So if you kind of think about I mean, one way to interpret the current internet like era of the internet is it's actually a corporate slash enterprise era, right?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  And I'll admit my bias is towards consumer.

• 35:49Chris Dixon?

  No, and I'll say so just and I mine is too, but I but I work at a firm that does both and I see that see this stuff happening. The you know, if you just think about your typical experience of a corporate worker in 2018, you go to the office and maybe you're using Windows 95 and you know, some archaic, I don't know what ERP software and a bunch of other stuff. And then you go home and you're using this like, you know, retina iPad and Gmail and Facebook. It's a very, you know, it's like a little like a time travel experience, right? Like the software to work feels like 10 years ago. So I one interpretation, I think is what happening right now is we're just upgrading all that stuff and that's that's quote unquote SAS and all these other kinds of things going on and it's there's a lot of successful companies there.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Can I pose a question that literally I'm posing this to you because I wonder if structurally this is another thing. When you had web 2.0 flower, Microsoft had already had the antitrust thing, so they're not going to buy anybody, right? The dot com bubble had happened, so it had cleared the slate. So there was this decade long period for the Facebooks and everybody to surface and no one's going to take them out. So I'm almost asking you like

• 36:54Chris Dixon?

  And there was Yahoo who was trying a little bit, yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  A little bit, but not in not in the way that Microsoft could have. Microsoft could still have bought Amazon when it was a $5 stock, you know, like so maybe are we structurally in a situation where the danger is is that because the big players at the top Are so big and all they do is every time there's a new crop coming through, they just pick them up, incorporate them and turn them into a feature of their existing products.

• 37:20Chris Dixon?

  Instagram Stories, Snapchat would be the most.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 37:23Chris Dixon?

  They didn't even have to buy them in that case, right?

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 37:25Chris Dixon?

  That's the counter argument is the distribute on the consumer side.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  So if we're in a lull.

• 37:29Chris Dixon?

  Distribution is so strong that even if you have that great idea. Now, now there are also, but there are limits to this, right? Like, there's only so many times Facebook can add, keep adding features to Instagram.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  This is true.

• 37:37Chris Dixon?

  You know, without like the thing becoming, you know.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying is, is that like, so then if Flickr comes around today, that would just be, you know, it's the most obvious example, tagging photos. But that would just be something that would be immediately scooped up and incorporated into someone's existing product. So like, are we in a lull because we almost got lucky 15 years ago that we had this period where everyone could rise up and no one kneecaps them?

• 38:00Chris Dixon?

  I think it definitely had, I mean, I just think it had, like, look at Snapchat, it's a great example, right? That was, I mean, you know, they really invented sort of a new media type, right? I mean, that type of, you know, whatever, the vertical, the vertical short video with stuff. It's a brand new idea and just the way that the ephemeral messaging and all, you know, it's probably on par with things like Flickr and sort of their new novelty. And then, you know, and they're still a very successful company and they're publicly traded and, you know. But I think their growth, most people would agree, was severely limited by the fact that all of the ideas propagated so quickly. And particularly companies like Facebook have gotten very good at execution and leveraging their massive distribution, right?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Well.

• 38:37Chris Dixon?

  And look, Amazon too, like, you have some great new, you know, Etsy comes along and then Amazon launches, I don't know how well it's done, but Amazon Homemade or whatever. You know, Instagram comes along and they launch, you know. So there, and they just take advantage of their scale and Amazon Prime and just all these other things.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  And I'm also almost saying it at the level of, like, if you, if you're a company that can, has the luxury of staying independent, then you have to find, if you have one good feature idea or one good product idea, but it's not an actually a good business, you have to bust your butt to make that happen. Versus if you're in an environment where you have one good feature and someone's gonna acquire you just to add that feature to their set, then you don't have to do the work of actually evolving that feature before it can become a good business.

• 39:21Chris Dixon?

  My partner, Alex Rempel, I'm gonna butcher the phrase, but it's something like startups try to find distribution. For their innovation faster than the incumbents attach innovation to their distribution.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:31Chris Dixon?

  Something like that, right? So it's sort of a race. And he always uses like TiVo as an example, like, great idea.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:35Chris Dixon?

  But you're competing against Comcast.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:37Chris Dixon?

  And like, you know, of course, it'll take Comcast five years to add this feature because they're just not very good at adding new features. But they're Comcast and they've got whatever X, tens of millions of households. And eventually they add the TiVo feature and, you know what I mean? Or can TiVo leverage that? Or like Netflix is probably the one of the most interesting ones today, right? Because it's, you know, a lot of people would have bet against that. They bet against it. The idea that they would be able to add on, you know, get to 200 million people before the people with 200 million people would figure out that like people want always on streaming and everything else, right? I sort of think of it as like the enterprise consumer thing. That said, there's always new, interesting stuff popping up. And, and I think there's always this kind of search on the periphery.

• 40:18Chris Dixon?

  I personally, where I enjoy spending my time is on the periphery on the, you know, virtual reality and crypto and all these other kinds of things. Like, there's always these periphery things and those, I think sometimes, you know, especially if you get a lot of developers fired up, can surprise you in the rate at which they improve. And I think at some point, I don't know when it'll be, but I, I think at some point there will be kind of a new set of infrastructure that unlocks new capabilities. And then we go back to that kind of low hanging fruit mode you described.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  But one of the key things to look for, and go back to the PC era, the Homebrew Computer Club.

• 40:50Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Go back to when the internet gets started and people are just doing it because they want to make cool websites. Go back to when the dot com. Always look for the people that are doing this, even though they don't think there, there's a reasonable expectation they'll get paid for it. Like, but they're so passionate about it.

• 41:04Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Like, the, the PC industry was literally created by hobbyists.

• 41:08Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  And, and so like, you should be looking in those spaces today, even as weird as those spaces might look right now. And, you know, even think of things like esports and things like that, that obviously are becoming very successful spaces right now. But like, that's where you need to look is where, on the developer side, but even literally on the hobbyist side, where are the people doing these things so passionately? That they don't, it doesn't even occur to them, it could be a business or an industry. Like, that's where the next industry.

• 41:33Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I like to think of it as, um. As when one I was I had one time I was thinking about this like, why is it that so many interesting tech things come from hobbies? And I had one model, this is one model I'd propose, which is, think about the things in life that operate on a two to three year time horizon versus the things that operate on a 10 year. So, most businesses, you go to your work nine to five, and almost every normal business, maybe a few outliers here and there, they operate on sort of, they manage to a, you know, quarterly or yearly cycle, right? And maybe they'll invest in sort of two to three year things or something. Who in the world invests at a 10 year cycle, right? I would say it's maybe academics, maybe like, things like DARPA.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Government, yeah.

• 42:13Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, government. And then it's, and then hobbyists frankly, right? Because the hobbyists don't care. If they're doing it for love, they're doing it, you know, because it's just cool, right? Like, people in whatever, the Homebrew Computer Club, they weren't thinking of what's the ROI on this for the next two years.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  They just wanted to program a machine of their own, that's it, yeah.

• 42:28Chris Dixon?

  But in some ways, I think there's, so I would argue there's a deeper truth to the hobbyist thing, it's not just, I mean, it's what you said, there's the passion, there's the smart people, but it's also there are people that are investing on a longer time horizon. And that's a very, that's a very important, it's sort of a rare thing, I think, in generally in the way capital, sort of, most corporations are designed today, they just simply aren't designed to operate at that timescale, right?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  That gets back to my theory of why we're in a lull, is that again, people are doing the same playbook. And like, you need to, you need to, that generation to come, it could just be a generational thing.

• 43:03Chris Dixon?

  It could be a generational thing.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Like, we need that turnover of...

• 43:05Chris Dixon?

  People who see things in a different way.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 43:08Chris Dixon?

  And just, maybe, and maybe they have to sometimes sort of forget at least recent history and sort of, you know, not, or not be acculturated into a certain way of thinking of what...

• 43:17Speaker 02

  And again, that almost makes me think that there was so, it's so beneficial to have a cleansing, a calling of the herd sometimes, to, to blow up the old models and blow up literally the old incumbents. Because then that's the only way that people, like, what we're talking about is people that are crazy enough to be like, well, we're going to do it this way.

• 43:36Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  And then, well, but that turns out to be the way that works in this new era. And so, it's harder now because it has been so successful that you have a framework where... Like it almost looks dumb to do things any other way right now.

• 43:50Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  And there's no incentive to do it.

• 43:52Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. So like last question, I guess, what were, were there a couple of things that you, you obviously know a lot about the history of technology. Or I assume already, you know, before the writing the book. What were some of the most surprising things you learned writing the book or most interesting things?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  How much it always is people feeling around in the dark, faking it until they make it, you know? And again, the-

• 44:16Chris Dixon?

  So you didn't, so that was, I mean-

• 44:18Speaker 02

  If you're an entrepreneur, you know that that's the truth always. And so that even though the book becomes the story of these were the guys that were successful. Like I was always looking for the thing, like, you know.

• 44:30Chris Dixon?

  I see, like, what's the secret? What did they do that was-

• 44:32Speaker 02

  My theory is that, because we know Bezos is so analytical, right?

• 44:36Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  So-

• 44:36Chris Dixon?

  He just had it all mapped out.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  And we know all the, no, no, no. We know the reason that he started with books. He did all the, he did all the, okay, this is our, but he was proving it to himself. He did not necessarily believe himself that commerce was better in a, in a virtual environment. But once he proved it, so like running, starting with books and running Amazon was almost like this test that he was running to himself. And then, because we see as soon as books proves it, then that's when pedal to the metal, get big fast. So even in the case of arguably the most successful entrepreneur of this generation.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  I think that he did not, you know, quit Wall Street, get in the car, no matter what he says, there's the hagiography on that or whatever. And he knew from day one, I'm going to have an everything store. I think he thought there could be an everything store, but he was running the test.

• 45:30Chris Dixon?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  And then, once he proved it to himself, then he went whole hog. And then, you know, other things like, again, with like social media and things like this, like who, how long did all of us think? Okay, this is a great thing, but is there a great business here behind this? Do you know what I mean? So like, it's almost the feeling around in the dark, even when you got a provably great idea.

• 45:53Chris Dixon?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Like fitting that to a provably great business model, you know? So it's, I think, it didn't, maybe it didn't surprise me that, but I want people to see that in the book, that it's not just a story of like, these are the geniuses that won. Like, why did they win? And guess what? In almost every single case, you know, the whole Facebook chapter is about Zuckerberg almost requiring people to tell him, no, you've got the great idea here. Run with this.

• 46:22Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, he was doing a

• 46:23Speaker 02

  A wire hog.

• 46:24Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, even, even like when, well, Facebook was sort of taking off. Right, he had Wirehog, which was just totally separate, kind of like

• 46:30Speaker 02

  They're already out in California and Sean Parker, at least this is Parker's telling, so you know, granted that, but he's got to convince, Mark, you have this great idea here, believe in this, you know? So, being an entrepreneur myself, I wanted to not bust the myths on that, but show that like, we'll always come behind 20 years later and say that we were geniuses and we saw it all along, but that's not the reality on the ground, so.

• 46:55Chris Dixon?

  All right, awesome. Well, thank you for being here and everyone listening should read the book, it's a great book, thanks.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.