#20 - Stupid Then Boring
Work can induce myopia. Projects pile up. Meetings pile up. Emails pile up. Gradually and then suddenly, all of your attention becomes focused internally. Without a concerted effort, it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on outside company walls. To remedy this, every so often it’s helpful to take a step back from your standing desk and look outside.
One helpful perspective here comes from Benedict Evans, a tech industry analyst and investor. All of the slides referenced below are from his wonderful deck Tech in 2020: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.
New technologies follow an S curve: first it’s stupid, then it’s exciting, then it’s boring:
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Think of the iPhone in 2007 — what is that?! — versus the iPhone today — Memoji, shrug.
Zooming out, this process has repeated itself for the past fifty years as we’ve moved from mainframes to mobile:
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
A key theme is that as technology has progressed, it has become more persuasive. In the 1940s, IBM’s CEO Thomas Watson famously said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Fifty years ago, only deep pocketed corporations and well funded research institutions could afford a mainframe. More than five were sold, but nothing too crazy. Fast forward to today and almost everyone has a smartphone in their pocket:
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
What’s remarkable about this is that it has enabled companies to succeed at unprecedented scale. WhatsApp has 2 billion monthly active users. YouTube has 1.8 billion. Some of the largest beneficiaries of this are platforms. We’ve all heard about Amazon, Facebook, and Google gobbling up market share. But how about about Shopify:
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
The company enables over $60B in gross merchandise volume on an annual basis.
Shopify benefits from the fact that when everyone has a computer in their pocket, everyone also has a potential business in their pocket. Cloud computing reduces the upfront cost needed to start a start-up, so instead of buying servers and IT hardware, funding now goes toward product development and customer acquisition. This has enabled the proliferation of new businesses and new business models:
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
A great example of this is the direct-to-consumer (DTC) space:
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
There’s-a-DTC-company-for-that could be the there’s-an-app-for-that for the 2010s. Gourmet, organic dog food? Check. Interested in rompers but scared of commitment? Don’t worry, we’ve got you. You want a foam mattress and you want it delivered to your front door? No worries, you’ve got 175 options.
We may be at the boring end of the smartphone era, but that doesn’t mean that stupid things can’t happen.
Source: Benedict Evans, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
If you’d like to learn more, the full deck is available here.