The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.
Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.
It's an old - and true - cliche that VCs rarely actually say 'no' - more often they say 'maybe', or 'not right now', or 'my partners aren't sure', or 'that's interesting, let me think about it'
All's fair in love, war and ride-sharing.
When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.
These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.
It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!
If we're in a bubble, it's the weirdest bubble I've ever seen, where everybody hates everything.
There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it's really really hard to predict those. I don't believe anyone can.
Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it's so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.
The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years.
I would say the consumer Internet companies - in a lot of ways, if you go inside the consumer Internet companies and you see how they run, it's how all their businesses are going to run.
More and more major industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies
There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.
The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based, much larger number of customers, that tend to over time be a lot more predictable. The advantage of the enterprise companies is they are not as subject to consumer trend, fad, behavior.
