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Comment by jackgavigan | Hacker News Reader

I dunno if it's just me (or perhaps I'm the wrong audience) but I've always found Meeker's presentations to be long on data (lots of graphs and numbers about trends that anyone who's at all interested in the Internet is already well aware of), and short on insight ("So what?").

This one's no different. There are exactly 15 slides (out of 190+) that I found interesting (16, 20, 50/51, 68, 99, 110, 141, 145, 146, 151, 153, 169, 172, and 184), and I find it very strange that there's precisely zero mention of FinTech or Bitcoin/Blockchain.

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The utility of this report is in having all of this raw data condensed into a single, authoritative entity. Think of it as detailed notes from your very attentive classmate. You may have absorbed most of the information by osmosis. But having the notes makes it a lot easier to study when finals arrive.

Something to keep in mind is that she's presenting the data and trends from the point of VC rather than a startup. So you can reverse engineer it as to what will get on an investors screen for this minute (well at least some investors).

But my problem is if you're a startup you tend to think along the lines of solving a problem rather than catching a trend. Another thing is that chasing trends doesn't always produce innovation. For example would Steve Jobs have gone ahead with the iPhone based on a presentation like this from say 2005?

We tend to like data because it gives us the illusion of control, and that's a very wall street way of thinking to make investors feel secure.

> Something to keep in mind is that she's presenting the data and trends from the point of VC rather than a startup.

I first encountered her when she and I were both working (separately) at Morgan Stanley back in 2002, and I thought the exact same thing back then.

15 interesting slides is a few standard deviations higher than what I normally find interesting in a talk

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