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it largely revolves around: "But people can’t spend more than 100% of their time or money on the Internet."

first off, although the internet is baked into everything, its not just about the internet. self driving cars, 3d printing, fake meats, and lots of other things I can't imagine.

2ndly, while you can't always take more time/money from a person, you can always add more people. there are something like 2 billion people living on 2$ a day. Its not inconceivable that the market/economy today is .1% of what it will be in 30 years.

even before covid19, businesses that were not taking advantage of the internet and tech was dying such as Macys... Businesses that dont invest like crazy into tech and R&D will go extinct.

I dont think the internet is maturing, its just getting started.

also: "The Silicon Valley of tomorrow will not look like that of today"

The SV of 1999 looked not much like 2004, which looked not much like 2009, which looked not much like 2014, which looks very different from 2020. Its not stating much, everyone knows that. It also furthers the point, there is a lot of growth in the future.

https://www.temasek.com.sg/en/news-and-views/stories/future/...

The big boys and behemoths of current and past eras emerged when there was a major change in technology or adoption. The two are also interdependent. New technologies drive new use cases and adoption in new segments, which drive further technological inventions.

Ubiquitous wireless devices, new AI capabilities, and wearable sensors are some areas that provide opportunities for startups today. Many more are still to come in the next few years and decades.

The idea that we’re hitting full saturation, or that startups will have to push into market vs pulling sales from market gaps assumes that we’re reaching full saturation across the board. That the reach of everyone being online also means they’re all online in the same markets / products / verticals.

I’ve worked most my career consulting as a software engineer, primarily split in 4-5 business verticals. The giants in those spaces (hiring, healthcare, cosmetics, etc) have 8-15% market share. And there’s constantly turn over where people for whatever reason exit and return to the customer pool.

So while from an economic and academic standpoint this seems pretty solid, I have a hard time accepting it practically.

Again, anything I know about this kind of thing is peripheral knowledge, so very likely wrong. would love some insight :)

What is more interesting to me is that the Internet is no longer magical. It’s not more fun that the electricity and everything revolves around few apps and services that produce the same content over and over again. Tiktok is the only new big thing in years and it’s not from SV.

The interesting things happen in the finance and news media. Right now these suck and innovations are happening there. There’s many things that suck too but nothing interesting is happening on most of these.

In other words, the internet as we know it is about finding and connecting what’s out there and that’s almost complete. The internet of tomorrow is about making sense of what is out there and restructuring it.

I think there’s a lot of green fields for tech just around the corner. But unlike the previous boom that one will be heavily connected with politics. It’s probably going to be just as destructive but less constructive and less fun.

mainframe -> pc -> laptop -> phone -> cloud/gpu/ai -> blockchain/vr/... -> quantum/self-driving-car/... .

Each of those bring massive high-margin software tides to ride.

In practice, life's still pretty sweet for cloud/gpu/ai startups, so we still seem to be roughly at that point. (We do a lot of gpu cloud accelerated security/fraud visual graph analytics: most enterprises still do it on-prem and basically just hope splunk can run regex without dying.) In GPU land, it's pretty clear they're being way underutilized, esp. due to slow SW rollout by various incumbents like cloud vendors.

We're still early on the transition to the next phase. The blockchain/vr/quantum startups raised a ton of funding, but have largely fallen flat. Some of the fundamentals in them seem sound, so they seem more of a matter of being early, not necessarily wrong. Current teams just couldn't get the tech together, or a true killer app: those are a question of time. Likewise, we know quantum etc. are coming, just need ~5 more years for what most general sw people start to get into.

IMO bigger risk is monopolies. Maybe the market reasoning is more from VC perspective, where everything feels 'expensive', and SaaS metrics era made investors forget how to take tech risks while the coming gen of platforms emerge.

EDIT: Some other potential near-term up-and-comers - synthetic bio (crispr,..), NN moving into program synthesis (so past perception and into automation), serverless. I don't follow agtech, but drones/robots/etc. are increasingly here.

There's still a big part of the growing world population who doesn't have internet access.

Internet connects not only people but also devices.

However, the growth of online businesses will mean shrinking elsewhere which I am not sure it is good. Amazon and the like will replace brick and mortar stores, Netflix will replace TV, food ordering will replace restaurants and so on.

There will be less time spent outside, less social interaction and the jobs created in IT industry might be less than the jobs lost elsewhere.

There is no guarantee that R&D will get thr same raw returns or even stay on top of the market but neglecting it from trying to not cannibalize their own markershare has proven a fatal mistake to companies.

Even being an "also ran" is better than getting your lunch eaten when the next new thing comes along.