Interview, Fireside Chat
a16z Podcast | Where is the Technology That "Matters?" Right Here
- Social games, networking, and initial consumer interactions are expected to evolve into drivers for 3D graphics, Oculus, and non-trivial services like Lyft, while Twitter continues serving as a primary channel for breaking news and revolutions.
- Media coverage is predicted to remain biased toward tangible consumer applications due to their mass appeal, often overlooking enterprise and infrastructure work, though the landscape may shift toward valuing users with intent to produce, reproduce, or invest over passive entertainment consumption.
- Institutional recognition for Bitcoin is projected to grow significantly, with Goldman Sachs estimating potential savings of $200 billion, potentially transforming it into a key platform for software deployment once a critical mass of wallet users is achieved.
- The technological sector is forecasted to undergo a "gear change" from social networks and games toward earth-shattering physical applications including self-driving cars, delivery drones, genomics, and 3D printing.
- A structural shift is anticipated from the 20th-century consumer-producer distinction to a "producer-consumer" model where developers build value for themselves, though only a larger fraction, not a majority, will appreciate enterprise products as self-valuation tools.
- Silicon Valley is moving toward significant gravitas by rethinking traditional industries such as education, transportation, hospitality, and healthcare, with a focus on biology and experienced scientists solving major economic problems through imminent investment announcements.
- The software industry is expected to expand vertically over the last five years as mobile computers increase terminals and software disrupts deeper industry verticals, fueled by falling data center costs and a global smartphone base projected to reach three to 3.5 billion.
- Future investment decisions and company formation will increasingly rely on comprehensive, up-to-date information sources similar to an improved Wikipedia, rather than headline-driven news, to support the flowering of innovation atop the settled Android-Apple platform war and technical savings from the last decade.
- Massive innovation is anticipated on top of settled smartphone platforms, where drone industries and hardware types will be enabled by advancements in smartphone chipsets, allowing billion-dollar companies to deploy on established install bases following killer applications.
- Young entrepreneurs will continue to benefit from a decade or more of prior hard work to rapidly build startups with millions of users, while the distinction between media for entertainment and media for production will increasingly define the attention economy.