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To be honest - it was impossible early on to see how Justin.tv (a guy wearing a camera on his head 24/7) or Airbnb (airbed rental) could turn into billion dolla

To be honest - it was impossible early on to see how Justin.tv (a guy wearing a camera on his head 24/7) or Airbnb (airbed rental) could turn into billion dollar companies. Often times we invest in great teams and just see what they can do. Remember hindsight is 20-20.

guelo 10y ago
Don't you think the web is maturing and consolidating quickly and there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for a guy with a camera to build a billion dollar business?
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Hasn't that case (lone founder meeting with success despite no resources) always been an extreme outlier? For every success story you can point to, there are probably thousands of failure stories. So those opportunities becoming "fewer" would not even be noticeable.
- beambot 10y ago
  Think about the evolution of various web technologies: Chat & Direct Messaging: Unix Talk, IRC, SMS, Jabber, XMPP, Snap, slack, etc. Message boards: Usenet, gopher, BBS, Wiki, Blogs, Myspace, Facebook, etc. You can literally look at almost any web technology, and it seems to be constantly reinvented, improved, and updated. It seems likely that the tools of today will necessarily evolve, at the hand of new upstarts.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Each is also getting more and more centralized and privatized.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      Exactly. The software business is about commoditizing your competitors stack. The internet business is about eliminating commodity stacks.
- jasim 10y ago
  "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." The status quo is _always_ broken. Change is unceasing. Assumptions that are true today need not remain so in the future. This can happen to any product, business and their culture. Opportunities are everywhere, but we get normalized to reality pretty soon, the status quo fervently resists change, new things by virtue of being new are hard to do and fail often, and so we conveniently avoid spotting them.
  - _ao789 10y ago
    This is such a motivational response, not sure if you intended it to be so (to that degree). Either way, thank you.
- rmason 10y ago
  "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, US Patent Office 1899 I personally believe we are 23 years into what Wired forecast was a 200 year boom for Internet software. Sure there have been ebbs and flows the past 23 years(I know cause I was there on the front lines) but I am not about to cast Wired's forecast as wrong.

guelo 10y ago

Don't you think the web is maturing and consolidating quickly and there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for a guy with a camera to build a billion dollar business?

ryandrake 10y ago
Hasn't that case (lone founder meeting with success despite no resources) always been an extreme outlier? For every success story you can point to, there are probably thousands of failure stories. So those opportunities becoming "fewer" would not even be noticeable.
beambot 10y ago
Think about the evolution of various web technologies: Chat & Direct Messaging: Unix Talk, IRC, SMS, Jabber, XMPP, Snap, slack, etc. Message boards: Usenet, gopher, BBS, Wiki, Blogs, Myspace, Facebook, etc. You can literally look at almost any web technology, and it seems to be constantly reinvented, improved, and updated. It seems likely that the tools of today will necessarily evolve, at the hand of new upstarts.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Each is also getting more and more centralized and privatized.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    Exactly. The software business is about commoditizing your competitors stack. The internet business is about eliminating commodity stacks.
jasim 10y ago
"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." The status quo is _always_ broken. Change is unceasing. Assumptions that are true today need not remain so in the future. This can happen to any product, business and their culture. Opportunities are everywhere, but we get normalized to reality pretty soon, the status quo fervently resists change, new things by virtue of being new are hard to do and fail often, and so we conveniently avoid spotting them.
- _ao789 10y ago
  This is such a motivational response, not sure if you intended it to be so (to that degree). Either way, thank you.
rmason 10y ago
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, US Patent Office 1899 I personally believe we are 23 years into what Wired forecast was a 200 year boom for Internet software. Sure there have been ebbs and flows the past 23 years(I know cause I was there on the front lines) but I am not about to cast Wired's forecast as wrong.