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Technologies like email, GPS, online maps, smartphones, streaming video, etc are no longer new. They are the new normal. Like living through the early 20th century when electricity, landlines, automobiles became popular. visualcapitalist.com/rising-speed-t…
As an investor one always thinks about ways in which a tech product could be disrupted. But it’s interesting to step back and ask: have some things attained their close-to-final form, at least for a while? For example, have Google Maps or YouTube changed *that* much recently?
If an industry is still young, the UX and the business model can be subject to radical disruption by a centralized actor (eg Zipcar to Uber). But if the feature set has been locked for a while, a different threat arises: a decentralized competitor (eg commercial Unix to Linux).
In the first phase, centralized companies slug it out to determine what the market actually wants. Centralization allows quick iteration on features, UX, business model, pricing. The winner(s) get windfall profits for a time. Then a backlash builds and we enter the second phase.
In the second phase, the feature set is locked but the company responsible (IBM, MSFT, etc) is considered a monopolist. The community responds with open source clones, which match the feature set but are free. In the past this meant IBM clones, Linux, etc. Today, we have crypto.
This has been obvious for a few years, but the thing to do is:
1) clone the UX of a successful but monopolistic product
2) blockchainify the backend to add incentives for early adopters & (perhaps) censorship resistance
The key is finding the 1st technically feasible candidate.
1) clone the UX of a successful but monopolistic product
2) blockchainify the backend to add incentives for early adopters & (perhaps) censorship resistance
The key is finding the 1st technically feasible candidate.
Again obvious, but it will likely be text-based apps that come first. It’s easier to build *partially* blockchain-based versions of Twitter or Craigslist in the next few years than something high bandwidth like YouTube or Snapchat. Don’t put it all on-chain, just the key parts.
If the SaaSification of every popular piece of desktop software was the mainstay of tech investing from ~2005-2015, the blockchainification of every major web app is the obvious investment strategy for the next 10 years. This time, though, the whole world may be able to get in.
