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 - 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

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 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:

1/ Just caught up with a few investor friends in the consumer space last week about Ozempic and GLP1s

As far as I can tell, everything basically hinges on: how much does it matter that every consumer product in the world depends on a tiny cohort of super consumers? 2/ What happens if it turns out we’ve actually invented an all-purpose anti-addiction drug?

I suspect it’s not properly appreciated how many consumer categories follow a power law distribution of consumptiontheatlantic.com/health/archive…

1/ I was rereading Softwar (the 2004 book on Larry Ellison and Oracle) this morning, and the main thing that stood out to me is that pretty much every idea in software today was already basically around 20 years ago 2/ Twenty years ago, everybody in the software industry was already debating whether "best of breed" applications would triumph over integrated solutions from Accenture ("one throat to choke")

1/ The more time I spend in the corporate world, the more I understand why everybody just hires ex-consultants and investment bankers

It’s not because McKinsey or Goldman Sachs actually teach you how to do the job, per se

It’s because hiring undergrads is a free rider problem 2/ Ultimately, new graduates don’t actually know how to do anything

This is less intended as a value judgment (I was the same when I graduated from Amherst), and more as a statement of fact that elite American universities are not intended to be trade schools

It’s an awesome feeling when you come across a new blog or Substack, read a half dozen of their posts, and think “wow, every single one of these is good.” Only happens to me once or twice a year

Anyways, that latest blog is dynomight.net I have no idea who @dynomight7 is but you’re cool, keep up the the good work

1/ This article on Pinduoduo (the 3rd largest e-commerce platform in China) is ostensibly focused on their new US venture Temu, but it quickly devolves into the most outrageous profile of Chinese corporate culture that I’ve ever read 2/ It starts out talking about how Temu’s org chart is structured into two warring factions trying to take each other over

To be fair this is relatively tame - organizing two competing teams on a single product is a relatively common practice in China tech

1/ The 2012 “AlexNet” paper (below) is usually considered the turning point for machine learning, when neural networks went from a 1980s punchline to the basis of all modern AI

But a new paper asks an interesting history question I hadn’t seen before - was AlexNet really first? 2/ The following excerpts all come from Appendix D of the recently-updated Sevilla et. al (2023) arxiv.org/abs/2202.05924

1/ A Google colleague recently observed to me that computer science tends to reinvent the wheel every 20 years: “a new generation just reimplements old ideas, but with more compute”

What’s fascinating is this 20 year cycle seems to coincide with the timing of tech stock bubbles 2/ Let’s do the math. For starters, I think everyone acknowledges at this point that 2022 was the popping of a once-in-a-generation tech bubble…

Something I’ve been pondering - the single biggest advantage that startups have over incumbents is probably the willingness to take insane reputational risks

I usually avoid discussing Tesla on Twitter, but Tesla in the early 2010s might be the best example of this ever In 2015, the European auto analyst at my old employer Bernstein went to Germany to interview a bunch of top execs in BMW, Mercedes, and Audi’s electric vehicle programs about the disruptive threat of Tesla

Some of these direct quotes look incredibly risk-adverse 7 years later

1/ This 2014 paper offers a very interesting answer to a question that I hadn’t actually thought to ask:

Why were none of today’s great global software companies born in Japan?

researchgate.net/publication/27… 2/ The paper essentially argues that Japan’s software industry has suffered from a double bind ever since the 90s:

A) Not enough supply - of CS students
B) Not enough demand - of high quality software from enterprise buyers

In retrospect, this was ridiculous: in 2021, Palantir invested over $700M in startups… on the condition they buy $700M in Palantir software. This singlehandedly drove a third of the company’s revenue growth!

wsj.com/articles/palan… In theory this could be a win-win if Palantir’s equity investments increase in value, but the average investment in this basket is now down -90%. Meaning in practice, Palantir was effectively paying companies to use their product (instead of, you know, the other way around)

1/ I don’t typically do reviews, but Super Founders was one of the most intriguing tech business books I’ve ever read

Most business books are just anecdotes and opinion. This book actually compiled quantitative data on 400 startups over 13 years to measure base rates for success 2/ The methodology: the book manually compiled data on 200 unicorns and 200 randomly selected startups (out of the 20,000 that raised $3M+ in funding from 2005 to 2018 per Pitchbook), and manually benchmarked each company across 65 attributes

1/ This episode of @AcquiredFM was impressive: it might actually be the most thorough history of AWS ever published (take it from someone who spent a *lot* of time studying early 2000s IT infrastructure at my last job)

But it still leaves out one thing -

acquired.fm/episodes/amazo… 2/ @gilbert and @djrosent spend 2+ hours analyzing 4 conflicting origin stories:

a. AWS was spare Amazon.com holiday capacity
b. AWS was Tim O'Reilly's idea (Web 2.0 APIs, but for infrastructure)
c. AWS was Andy Jassy's extension of SOA
d. AWS was Ben Black's idea

1/ IMO, the most interesting thing about the ongoing blowup of the quick commerce sector - Gopuff, Getir, Gorillas, JOKR, etc. - is that pretty much all of this already happened 20 years ago with Webvan, the online grocery darling of the first tech bubble

A few quick thoughts... 2/ For those who don't remember, Webvan was the first real online grocery delivery startup of the internet era

There aren't really any postmortems available publicly, so this 2001 HBS case study is probably the best history you can read on it hbsp.harvard.edu/product/602037…

1/ Every time I hear about the "metaverse" becoming the next internet (ugh), I don't think about the history of the internet - instead, I think about the history of the information superhighway

Aka the half-baked, corporate, also-ran version of the internet beaten by the web 2/ The birth of the consumer internet was arguably in late 1994, when Netscape launched. But something you realize after cursory historical research is that by 1993, virtually every important person in media and tech knew *something* approximating the internet was going to emerge

1/ Something I think about a lot: when it comes to tech history, it's just as important to not "overlearn" the lessons of the past as it is to learn them at all

A good example: this 2009 Bernstein report on Twitter & Facebook, "The Ruinous History of Pre-Business Internet Deals" 2/ In retrospect, investors "overlearned" the lessons of history from the tech bubble. By the late 2000s, the collapse of AOL, Yahoo, and other Web 1.0 properties had "proven" it was impossible to make money advertising on general-use social platforms

1/ There's a well known anecdote from The Everything Store about Jeff Bezos visiting Harvard Business School in 1997. The students told Bezos "you really need to sell to Barnes and Noble and get out now"

Less well known: you can read the actual 1997 HBS case study from the class 2/ It's easy to laugh at predictions in retrospect - but with the information available at the time, would you have known better?

store.hbr.org/product/leader…

1/ I always joke that predicting the future of tech is way easier than most people think... the hard part is making any money off those predictions

This 2001 paper ("Big in Japan: iMode and the Mobile Internet") is one of the best examples I've ever seen- core.ac.uk/download/pdf/3… 2/ Looking back, the modern smartphone era didn't begin until the launch of the iPhone in 2007

But this paper makes it clear: even in 2001, it was obvious to pretty much everyone that the future of the internet was going to be mobile

1/ In 1968, former ARPA director J. C. R. Licklider published "The Computer As A Communication Device"

Given it was written right before the launch of the ARPANET, this is basically the founding document of the internet

And its predictions hold up remarkably well! 2/ For context: Mitchell Waldrop has called JCR Licklider "computing's Johnny Appleseed." As an ARPA director in the 60s, he basically funded half of the projects that became the internet

This paper was the brainchild of him & protege Bob Taylor, who later led Xerox PARC

1/ A fun piece of tech history that I came across today: an online copy of Microsoft's 1986 IPO prospectus. At just 52 pages, a light piece of weekend reading!

Some takeaways from my skim -

lannigan.org/pdf/Microsoft_… 2/ No surprise, valuations were still in a whole other world back then

Microsoft IPOed with $140M in 1985 revenues (growing 40% per annum), and 30% operating margins

Yet the IPO market cap was $520M... aka ~3x forward sales, or ~15x forward *earnings*