The End of the Beginning [video] | Hacker News Reader

The End of the Beginning [video]

ben-evans.com

77 pointsdirtyaura20 comments

Some fun tidbits in there.

Amazon's original business plan: "No warehouses, no stock, no shipping"

This was an odd presentation. There were a bunch of interesting data points and ideas about how the Internet really hasn't change commerce as much as it will. But then it ends on a bit of a whimper mostly saying "we couldn't see what was coming in 1993 and we can't tell right now".

The part that I found most interesting was the idea that we're moving away from low-capital startups.

Does that mean venture capital is going to have to get much bigger to fund these ventures? Does it suggest the ballooning of worldwide VC funding isn't just a bubble? (There's a really interesting chart in WSJ that I can't find right now). And will a few massive VCs become more powerful while smaller ones fizzle? What about ycombinator?

Does it mean that technical talent will be more or less valuable? Much more talent will be needed, but there's probably less opportunity to build a massive business with a few talented geeks as the low-hanging software fruit is probably plucked. Talented developers might be less critical to business success.

It's a solid presentation and full of insights (per usual). There were some puzzling aspects, however, like the point about the shift to capital intensive startups. Some thoughts:

(1) It isn't clear whether Evans believes the shift in higher capital requirements will occur in the early-stage or when a successful startup reaches maturity. The industries left to 'disrupt' do seem to be capital intensive industries, but that fact alone doesn't preclude 'disruption' from early-stage, low-capital startups. Technology changes the boundaries of industries through a process the economist Brian Arthur calls, "abstraction and redomaining". In Evans' terminology, new enabling layers allow us to do new things in new ways. I like to think of this as: technological change opens up competitive attack vectors that are neither inside, parallel to, or perpendicular with, but rather diagonal to an industry.

[Abstraction for Arthur is different than Evans' use of that term when Evans describes how ML will provide deeper levels of meaning in comparison to the query abstraction of Google, FB, and Amazon]

(2) He contrasts Yelp with Door Dash to illustrate this shift. I know for a fact that GrubHub was a low-capital endeavor in the early-stage. Is it now capital intensive? Perhaps.

(3) The original search engines, which Google subsequently eviscerated, were on track to be capital intensive at scale/maturity. This is a direct counterexample to a simplistic take on Evans' narrative, unless we only care about the startups that come to dominate a space.

(4) Google may actually have been a capital intensive project as it was two guys in a garage... who were finishing CS Ph.ds from Stanford. It matters how we define 'capital'. The natural move is to classify Brin and Page as an "R&D" line item on the income statement, and say that moving forward "R&D" will be more expensive and/or other indirect costs will be significantly higher. However, this doesn't sufficiently clear things up.

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I think the most we can say is that the Financial Services, Automotive, Industrial, Biotech, etc. sectors are more capital intensive than Media and much of Retail. Though, it isn't clear whether this means 'disruption' is any more expensive or complex than it was before.

Just want to point out phrase about "Netflix eating TV". I would like to give an example that TV didn't destroy or replaced radio, they are different technologies and still co-exist.

Mostly that's because you can't watch when driving.

I'm in the UK and blessed with BBC radio.

* You can listen while driving * while cooking * while gardening * while flicking through the newspaper * while falling asleep.

Wouldn't be without my audio friend.

I wish I had more experience with the BBC. On the surface, it seems like a very interesting experiment. From outside, I imagine BBC would be different from other broadcast television stations in that it doesn't have do ads (BBC outside the UK is different, I believe). How much of a difference does it make? I'd love to hear some insight from people in the UK.

I'm a Brit, vehemently anti-ad, but am not a fan of the BBC, and don't support it (financially or otherwise).

It may have made some sense back when it was the only broadcaster, but now that it's one of many, and there are proven alternatives for ad-free (e.g. the HBO subscription model), I can't see any justification for continuing to force people to pay for a channel they don't like and don't use.

Whereas I agree with the sentiment, I find that nearly all subscription TV (Sky, etc) has 15 minutes of adverts an hour. These include the premium channels, such as Sky films and Sports. I don't see why anyone would pay £60 a month for these channels to play 8 hours of adverts each a day, and then complain about the TV licence cost of £150 a year.

The only subscription service I use is Netflix, which doesn't have ads and is cheaper than the TV license. I wouldn't pay for anything that did have ads, and I don't see why "some people spend a lot on ad-infested channels" in inconsistent with "some people complain about being forced to pay for something they don't use".

> I can't see any justification for continuing to force people to pay for a channel they don't like and don't use.

When you say "channel" you're talking about 7 Tv Channels and numerous radio stations

So? I don't use any of them.

I listen to a mix of BBC programming and commercial radio while driving to work. The ad-free BBC allows for some real immersion in the programme content, which is great for plays and documentary. E.g. something like “In our time” which devotes 45 totally uninterrupted mins to a single subject. When I get bored with the serious stuff I switch to commercial music radio and use the ad-breaks to cycle to the next station that is playing music. So, lack of ads allows real depth in the content.

I stopped listening to commercial radio maybe 20 years ago. The commercial aspects ruin the experience - too many ads, too many loud strident and annoying ads, too small and repetitive a playlist. Very little news, talk, science, comedy etc.

Classic FM was OK for a while, but these days I almost constantly listen to BBC radio in the car or at home because unlike TV I can do other things at the same time. When I'm listening to R4 at home (talk radio with news, science, current affairs and comedy) it's often interesting or funny enough to deserve full attention. I still prefer radio as a day's background noise over constant streaming thanks to the variety in programming through the day, and the periodic talk, and news. I turn off or switch for some of course. :)

TV I mostly gave up on, except some BBC, and films and a few series via Netflix etc. I hate UK commercial TV - way too many ads now, enough to ruin the programming and stop me wanting to watch.

Without BBC radio it would ruin my day. Most days. I'm not sure what I'd do without it. Listen to a lot more audio books maybe, as I don't want 100% music.

If you want to experience the BBC a lot of radio is available for ad free download, podcast, or streaming on site, and there's always the World Service. Not sure how TV access is from abroad. World Service is interesting because it gives a distinct perspective that's different to domestic UK broadcasts. I used to listen a lot when I was often up late.

I think its worth noting that BBC Radio 4 is deemed sufficiently important that checking for its broadcast is one of the tests that the UK nuclear deterrent submarines use to determine if civilisation as we know it has ended.

Yes, I do complain about the BBC occasionally (e.g. I was genuinely shocked as to how partisan they were during the Scottish Independence Referendum) but overall I love their service and am quite happy to pay my license fee.

I'd like to point out that parent is talking about BBC radio, but you're asking about TV. I point this out because I was about to reply that if you're in the U. S., you can get much the same experience with a collection of local public radio stations. At least in the Seattle area, there's the classical station, there's the "mostly jazz" station, a couple of NPR affiliates. Mostly ad-free, if one doesn't count the bumper sponsorships.

But you were asking about TV, so that doesn't apply. Though between Netflix and HBO Go, we get all the TV we can watch without ads. It's jarring to turn on a TV in a hotel room these days. "I'm continually amazed that people pay for this."

A better comparison would have been TV and film. A lot of "ecological niches" in the media landscape that are currently being taken over from TV by internet streaming used to be taken up film. Can you imagine going to the cinema for a news broadcast?

> Can you imagine going to the cinema for a news broadcast?

In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, cinema did in fact deliver news.

> Regular newsreels were exhibited from 1910 and soon became a popular way for finding out the news. [0]

Newsprint and newsreels existed side-by-side and while newspapers did go into greater depth, newsreels at the cinema were widespread. I don't have exact dates at hand, but newsreels at the cinema stopped with the advent of broadcast television, an example of one media largely displacing another.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film

> In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, cinema did in fact deliver news.

That was my point...

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