Corry Wang Profile picture
Mar 23, 2019 8 tweets 3 min read Read on X
A contrarian sentiment I've heard a lot recently is that "small and focused always wins" in tech. Now, this certainly *felt* right the first time I heard it - off the top of my head, I couldn't actually think of that many counterexamples
But on the other hand, this could just be the availability heuristic at work... so in the interest of intellectual honesty, I sat down for 20 minutes and compiled a list of every small and focused tech company I could think of that ultimately got stomped. Here's what I got:
1) Netscape -> Microsoft
2) Fitbit / Jawbone -> the Apple Watch
3) Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Word
4) Blackberry and Palm -> the iPhone (in the eternal words of Palm CEO Ed Colligan, circa 2006: “PC guys are not going to just figure this out")
5) Rackspace -> Amazon Web Services
6) Rhapsody -> iTunes Store
6) Mapquest -> Google Maps (ok fine Mapquest was owned by AOL already at that point)
7) Literally any adtech company in the late 2000s -> Google (though yes, I suppose they did acquire Doubleclick)
To be honest, this list was harder to put together than I expected (so maybe there's some truth to "small and focused" after all? either that or I just don't know enough failed mid-2000s consumer startups) - I'll probably update this list periodically, always open to suggestions
Two more enterprise names I just thought of:
8) Fusion-io -> Netapp + all the other legacy guys
9) Extreme Networks -> Cisco

Does "small and focused" matter less in enterprise? CIOs don't care about UX, they want one throat to choke, etc... but maybe the cloud changes that?
This tweet from @stevesi reminded me of a good one to add to this list:



10) QuarkXPress -> Adobe Creative Suite (and Adobe probably killed a bunch of other smid-cap companies making "creative" software in the 90s / early 2000s that I've never heard of)
@stevesi 11) Diapers.com / Quidsi

For all of the talk today that Amazon has no focus vs nimbler vertical e-commerce companies, I think it’s pretty tough to argue that Marc Lore was ultimately the victor in the original Amazon-Diapers.com price war

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More from @corry_wang

Jun 19
1/ I don’t think people have realized how much this new Waymo scaling laws paper is basically an admission that “Waymo was wrong, Tesla was right”

Hopefully this becomes a call to action internally within Waymo Image
2/ This paper shows autonomous driving follows the same scaling laws as the rest of ML - performance improves predictably on a log linear basis with data and compute

This is no surprise to anybody working on LLMs, but it’s VERY different from consensus at Waymo a few years ago
3/ Waymo built its tech stack during the pre-scaling paradigm. They train a tiny model on a tiny amount of simulated and real world driving data and then finetune it to handle as many bespoke edge cases as possible

This is basically where LLMs back in 2019
Read 7 tweets
Apr 23
1/ Was this the biggest miss in the history of pharma? Apparently in 1990, Pfizer preemptively abandoned development of the first GLP1 drugs

Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, Mounjaro, etc. were doing $60B+ in runrate revenues at the end of last year. None are made by Pfizer Image
2/ Source is this retrospective written by Jeffrey Flier (former dean of Harvard Medical School) about his biotech startup MetaBio in the late 1980s: muse.jhu.edu/article/936213
3/ MetaBio was founded in 1987. That was the year Joel Habener first reported GLP-1’s ability to stimulate glucose-dependent insulin secretion - in retrospect, the moment of “discovery” for GLP-1s

MetaBio became the first company in the world to license Habener’s GLP-1 patents Image
Image
Read 9 tweets
Feb 16
1/ If you really believe LLMs will dramatically compress the cost of software development in 3-5 years, doesn't this obviate the reason for independent software vendors to exist?

This doesn't seem obviously crazy to me - it'd just be a return to the days of mainframes Image
2/ When IBM invented the mainframe in the 50s, there were no independent software companies - IBM bundled their hardware with a COBOL compiler, which customers then used to write custom software themselves
3/ The world's first independent software vendors (e.g. ADR, Informatics, MSA) all started in the 60s as contract programmers - basically, consultants hired to write custom COBOL for clients - who then realized they could resell that custom code to multiple customers Image
Read 8 tweets
Jan 19
1/ This internal 2007 Nokia presentation on the first iPhone is a really good example of how incumbents actually get disrupted

Oftentimes, the incumbent already knows what needs to be done. It's just that organizational incentives inhibit the incumbent from doing it Image
2/ This slide deck was posted on Hacker News earlier this week but just got taken down

I have no idea how they got their hands on a copy but it does look like a legit internal Nokia presentation from strategy team at the timenews.ycombinator.com/item?id=427247…
3/ Contrary to popular belief, people at Nokia in 2007 understood that the iPhone was a big deal

The iPhone's touchscreen would "set a new standard of state-of-art"

Nokia's own user interface paradigm was "in decline" Image
Read 7 tweets
Jun 23, 2024
1/ I just finished a 2.5 week trip through China today, my first visit in about a decade. I was there for family reasons, but it also happened to be my first time in the country as a tech industry observer

My amateur travel journal on the China tech market - Image
2/ OBSERVATION #1 - Yes, everything really does run on WeChat

If you're a foreign traveler visiting China, you really must set up WeChat Pay and Alipay beforehand. For me, this was the Chinese equivalent of Whatsapp + Chrome + Venmo + my credit card + my subway card + Doordash
3/ I didn't use cash a single time on my 19 day trip. Everybody took WeChat Pay, from Michelin-starred restaurants, to McDonalds, to butchers at the farmers markets in tier 3 cities, to performing musicians in national parks
Image
Image
Read 28 tweets
Jan 21, 2024
1/ Just realized we recently passed the 30 year anniversary of Nathan Myhrvold's internal Microsoft memo "Road Kill on the Information Highway."

This 1993 memo is probably the most prescient set of 10-ish predictions ever written on the rise of the internet Image
2/ A hobby is mine to read books about the future, written in the past (how else could you grade the author's work?)

Let's grade Myhrvold's predictions:
3/ PREDICTION #1: The rise of a surveillance society - police bodycams, CCTV, 24/7 personal recording, and AI deepfakes

GRADE: A-

Pretty close! Image
Read 12 tweets

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