software is eating the world

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The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

Their examples offer hope to others who would like to try to acquire some programming skills at an age when it will not come as easily as it does to the young. Even if Marc Andreessen’s phrase Software is eating the world is not at the tip of everyone’s tongue, an inchoate sense of software’s centrality is widely understood. The warm reception that greeted Codecademy at its debut speaks to a broad yearning to be a participant in, and not remain a passive bystander to, the spread of software everywhere. All beginnings embody hope, and Y Combinator gives birth to beginnings by the dozens—with the propulsive power of Software is eating the world at their backs. This gives the group portrait a most hopeful cast. Like newly minted graduates, the founders step out into the daylight with nothing but possibility ahead.

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For Rebecca, Martin, Jacob, and Alex CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Dedication INTRODUCTION 1 YOUNGER 2 OLDER 3 GRAD SCHOOL 4 MALE 5 CRAZY BUT NORMAL 6 UNSEXY 7 GENIUS 8 ANGELS 9 ALWAYS BE CLOSING 10 CLONE MYSELF 11 WHAT’S UP? 12 HACKATHON 13 NEW IDEAS 14 RISK 15 MARRIED 16 FEARSOME 17 PAY ATTENTION 18 GROWTH 19 FIND A DROPBOX 20 DON’T QUIT 21 SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix: The Summer 2011 Batch Notes Index INTRODUCTION San Francisco Gray Line is the largest sightseeing tour company in Northern California. It offers tours of San Francisco, of Muir Woods and Sausalito or the wine country north of the city, but it no longer offers a tour of Silicon Valley, immediately south.

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There are literally thousands of startups, dispersed along the sixty-mile corridor that extends between San Francisco and San Jose, but they all operate under secrecy until they are ready to launch their first product. That’s why there can never be a Gray Line tour of Silicon Valley’s future. It’s a shame, because this place is creating everyone’s future. Software is eating the world—the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has come up with a rather catchy way of describing the disruption, under way or coming soon, to industries seemingly distant from the tech world. Software-based startups will do much of the disrupting. They take advantage of cloud-based Internet services that make computing power a utility, easily tapped, and whose cost has dropped a hundredfold in the ten years since first introduced.

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders by Mariya Yao, Adelyn Zhou, Marlene Jia

Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cognitive load, computer vision, conceptual framework, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, natural language processing, new economy, OpenAI, pattern recognition, performance metric, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, skunkworks, software is eating the world, source of truth, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, subscription business, technological singularity, The future is already here

You’ll want to include a theoretical introduction to help them separate hype from reality and also hands-on experience to help them understand both the limitations and potential of AI implementations in a corporate setting. To learn more about our executive education offerings, visit appliedaibook.com/education. * * * (41) Andreessen, M. (2011, August 20). Why Software Is Eating the World. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/woxq8c (42) Lardinois, F. (2016, September 26). Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on how AI will transform his company. Tech Crunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-on-how-ai-will-transformhis-company/ (43) D’Onfro, J. (2016, April 28).

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These tech companies often know more than you do about what your customers search for, what they buy, what they say, who they interact with, where they are, and how they might behave in the future. Their expertise has helped them to grow rapidly with high profit margins, overwhelming less tech-savvy competitors in the process. Technology companies may not compete directly with you today, but heed prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's warning that “software is eating the world."(61) As consumers opt for the convenience of Amazon Prime and investors question other companies’ abilities to compete against the “Amazon Effect," retailers across a wide range of industries have seen their profits and stock values decline.(62) Amazon has even launched private labels for popular product categories that directly compete for market share with third-party sellers on their own platform.(63) Web traffic and advertising revenues have plummeted at many online media publishers.(64) Even though digital advertising spending is growing, Google and Facebook present a duopoly that captured 85 percent of the new growth in the first quarter of 2016.(65) Technological superiority alone cannot account for success.

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Constantly switching true north metrics will confuse your team and hinder your execution. * * * (60) Baran, B., Di, W., Li, M., & Yuan, C.-Y. (2018, March 6). Big data analytics and machine learning techniques to drive and grow business. Symposium conducted at the Strata Data Conference, San Jose. (61) Andreessen, M. (2011, August 20). Why Software Is Eating the World [Editorial]. Wall Street Journal Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460 (62) Gold, R., & Chaudhuri, S. (2017, September 28). ‘Amazon Effect’ Leads Investors to Sour on Global Retail. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-effect-leads-investors-to-sour-onretail-1506591003 (63) Perez, S. (2016, November 3).

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

“radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”: Kirkpatrick, 209. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends”: Kirkpatrick, 199. “To get people to this point where there’s more openness”: Kirkpatrick, 200. “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government”: Kirkpatrick, 254. “Software is eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. “You have to make words less human”: Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, February 8, 2009. “You know I’m an engineer”: Ben Thompson, “Why Twitter Must Be Saved,” Stratechery, November 8, 2016.

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A very different version of this dream, however, has come to fruition, in the form of the CEOs of the big tech companies. We’re not ruled by engineers, not yet, but they have become the dominant force in American life, the highest, most influential tier of our elite. Marc Andreessen coined a famous aphorism that holds, “Software is eating the world.” There’s a bit of obfuscation in that formula—it’s really the authors of software who are eating the world. There’s another way to describe this historical progression. Automation has come in waves. During the Industrial Revolution, machinery replaced manual workers. At first machines required human operators.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The average number of companies: Adrian Wooldridge, “America can’t control the global flow of ideas,” The Economist, September 13, 2018, www.economist.com/business/2017/04/22/why-the-decline-in-the-number-of-listed-american-firms-matters. value of just $438 million: Alex Wilhelm, “A Look Back in IPO: Amazon’s 1997 Move,” TechCrunch, June 28, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/28/a-look-back-at-amazons-1997-ipo. “software is eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. gone in the next ten years: Michael Grothaus, “Bet You Didn’t See This Coming: 10 Jobs That Will Be Replaced by Robots,” Fast Company, January 19, 2017, www.fastcompany.com/3067279/you-didnt-see-this-coming-10-jobs-that-will-be-replaced-by-robots.

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An old Henry Ford quote best sums up my feelings on this question: “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” Will there be enough work for everyone? If organizations get smaller and technology grows ever more capable, what will we all do all day? Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation are reshaping the workforce as we speak. When Marc Andreessen said that “software is eating the world,” he wasn’t kidding. Everywhere you look, the complicated work is becoming the domain of technology. The bots in my company already do the work of a couple people—handling everything from collecting feedback to scheduling meetings. Self-driving trucks such as the one Tesla is developing threaten the livelihoods of many more.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

The assumption is that the market is known and defined. It’s a linear factory mindset and it’s no longer applicable. In times of revolution, as markets evolve rapidly, companies need to widen their perspective and focus on customer-need states. Software is eating the world Inventor of the first graphical web browser ‘Mosaic’ and now venture capitalist Marc Andresseen famously said that ‘software is eating the world’. His inference is that any industry that can be disrupted by the use of software, will be and that all industries are being attacked by a new breed of entrepreneur — the four-dollar tech startups, as I like to call them.

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Friday night lights Yes, but it’s different Emotions + incentive = shaped behaviour People won’t share that stuff Bursting into reality Rising realism Doing > having The gaming mentality The sixth sense Our decentralised nervous system Start making sense Product = computer Mash-up heaven The seed is planted Not if, but when and who Chapter 15: System hacking: a great idea with a bad reputation Hacking defined Hacker culture Hacking is inevitable Retail hacking Industry hacking My favourite media hack Why we have to self-hack Step forward MOOCs Yes, but they’re not-for-profits Chapter 16: The job, the factory and the home: how location follows technology From the city, to the suburbs, to wherever Along came Henry The end of offices History repeats Work options Offices, control and profits A better office offer Idea diffusion The office is not immune The last industrial relic Chapter 17: A stranger from Romania: building a real Lego car A new low for the internet Digital tenacity Marketing rocket science The Super Awesome Micro Project The hourglass strategy The human motive An open-ended strategy Chapter 18: Market-share folly and industrial fragmentation: industrial metrics Market-share folly The key assumption = we know the market Software is eating the world Did they see them coming? Redefining industries through infrastructure Collaboration with competitors We’ll just buy the winners The pace of change Internal venture capital Cold War era thinking Ignore resources and self-disrupt Chapter 19: The externality reality: is this the end of privacy?

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

and ultimately flawed: Riley Beggin, “Report: The CDC Contaminated Its First Coronavirus Tests, Setting US Back,” Vox, April, 18, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/4/18/21226372/coronavirus-tests-cdc-contaminated-delay-testing. “Software is eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Andreessen Horowitz, August 20, 2011, https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/. two more contracts, worth $25 million: Dave Nyczepir, “HHS Cites Coronavirus ‘Urgency’ in Speedy Palantir Contract Awards,” FedScoop, May 8, 2020, https://www.fedscoop.com/hha-covid-funds-palantir/. former CDC director accused: Charles Ornstein, “Out of View: After Public Outcry CDC Adds Hospital Data Back to Its Website—for Now,” ProPublica, July 16, 2020, https://www.propublica.org/article/out-of-view-after-public-outcry-cdc-adds-hospital-data-back-to-its-website-for-now.

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This put the United States roughly six weeks behind South Korea, which arrested its own outbreak quickly. And then there was Silicon Valley. Factory workers had been laid off, restaurants had closed, shopping malls were abandoned—but the world that Peter Thiel inhabited was absolutely booming. All the predictions about the ways that technology would subsume aspects of our lives—“Software is eating the world,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously put it—were suddenly, forcefully, coming true. Every primary and secondary school in America suddenly needed a Zoom account, and every child needed a tablet. Amazon sales—on everything from cloth bandanas to 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles—spiked so dramatically that the company had to triage its shipping times.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Here’s how Chris Allen, a research scientist at bitcoin infrastructure: Chris Allen, “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity,” Life with Alacrity blog, April 25, 2016, http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html. CHAPTER NINE “Software is eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. “Unless we understand better how technologies…”: S. Jasanoff, The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future (W. W. Norton, 2016). In his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism”: Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” First publication in Fortnightly Review, February 1891, p. 292.

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But this shift to decentralized trust, along with all other disruption coming from, you name it—self-driving cars, automated medicine, peer-to-peer credit, 3D printing, artificially intelligent writers—will be too big to keep up with. The idea that the office towers of New York and Chicago will be left half empty for decades is not unfeasible. “Software is eating the world,” as Marc Andreessen likes to say. It’s not just the loss of jobs that’s the problem. It’s also the broader problem of letting algorithms decide what our world looks like. The priorities, preferences, and prejudices of software designers are baked into the code they write, whether it’s the program that dictates which passengers Uber drivers pick up or the incentive model in the Bitcoin protocol.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Conservative back-of-the envelope calculations find those savings to be equivalent to 1 per cent of our GDP—enough for two Golden Quadrilateral road systems across the country every year,2 or to send 200 Mangalyaan missions to Mars annually.3 One year’s savings are also sufficient to provide minimal health insurance for every family in the country for three years.4 Software is eating the world In 2011, Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, famously proclaimed, ‘Software is eating the world. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defence. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures.’5 For the most part, these businesses and services have come into existence only in the last decade, but have transformed our social landscape to the point that we now wonder how we ever got by without them.

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Bagla, Pallava. 23 September 2014. ‘Mangalyaan, the cheapest Mars mission ever’. NDTV. http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/mangalyaan-the-cheapest-mars-mission-ever-66974 4. Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana. http://www.rsby.gov.in/about_rsby.aspx 5. Andreessen, Marc. 20 August 2011. ‘ Why Software Is Eating the World’. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460 6. Saran, Rohit. 26 December 2005. ‘1995: Cell phones arrive’. India Today. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/bengal-cm-jyoti-basu-made-indias-first-cell-phone-call-to-telecom-minister-sukh-ram-in-1995/1/192421.html 7.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

While Apple employs fifty thousand people and has a market capitalization that has risen fivefold over the last five years, the Taiwan companies that make gadgets for Apple employ millions but have seen their stock prices stagnate for lack of pricing power. The hardware is easy to replicate, which in turn cuts profit margins, while the software is highly profitable so long as it continues to evolve. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has argued, in a Wall Street Journal essay called “Why Software Is Eating the World,” that two decades after the invention of the modern Internet, and a decade after the collapse of the Internet bubble, the software industry is at last reaching critical mass. The technology required to transform industries through software finally works and is accessible. Two billion people have access to broadband, and by the end of the decade, Andreessen predicts, five billion will have access to the Internet through smart phones.

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“Sri Lanka’s Constitutional Amendment: Eighteenth Time Unlucky.” Economist, September 9, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/1699214 “Sri Lanka’s War: Two Years On.” Economist, May 19, 2011. http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/05/sri_lankas_war 13: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry Andreessen, Marc. “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. 2020 Innovation: Pulling the Future towards US. November 2011. Commission on Growth and Development. The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development.

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Agency for International Development (USAID), 195, 197, 198 utilities, 75, 164–65, 177, 201, 206–7, 209, 212–13 Uttar Pradesh, 37, 49, 52, 79 vasectomies, 55–56 Velvet Revolution, 103 Venezuela, 89, 190, 214–15 venture capital, 238 Vestel, 120 videos sales, 211 Vienna, 104 Vietnam, 198–204 banking in, 202 China compared with, 30, 199, 200–203, 204 Communist regime of, 199–200, 203 economy of, 30, 198–99 foreign investment in, 198–200, 201, 203–4 growth rate of, 157, 201–2, 204 income levels in, 204 inflation rate in, 202, 248 infrastructure of, 199, 200–201 labor market in, 199, 203–4 oil industry of, 200–201 population of, 199 stock market of, 198–99, 202 Vietnam War, 199, 203 visas, 79, 94, 125 vodka, 90 Vogue, 53 Volkswagen, 103 Volvo, 144 wage levels, 7, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 42, 62, 65, 80, 87–88, 109, 132, 137, 179, 180, 248 Wall Street, viii–ix, 1–2, 8, 86, 89, 227, 243 Wall Street Journal, 21, 237, 238–39 Wang, Haiyan, 237 warranties, 162 Warsaw, 97, 98, 103–4 wealth, vii–viii, 8, 12–13, 25, 31–32, 42, 44–47, 45, 57, 71, 76, 79, 91, 98, 103, 131–38, 142, 148, 169, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178–79, 236, 254 see also billionaires welfare programs, x, 10, 41–42, 61, 63, 72, 87–88, 126–27, 175, 181–83 Wen Jiabao, 17 West Bengal, 37 Western Cape, 175 Western civilization, viii–xix, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 241–47 “whack a mole” game, 68 wheat, 83, 232 white-collar workers, 169 “white Turks,” 125 “Why Software Is Eating the World” (Andreessen), 238–39 Wilkinson, Ben, 203 wireless networks, 10 Woju, 24 women, 21, 24, 31, 106, 145, 169, 220 Worker’s Party, 66 World Bank, 7, 85, 94, 194, 235 World Cup (2010), 177 World Cup (2022), 219 World Economic Forum, 176, 178 World Trade Organization (WTO), 29 World War I, 114, 194 World War II, 97, 169, 252–53 Xie, Andy, 251–52 Xinjiang, 53 Yar’Adua, Umaru, 210 Year of Living Dangerously, The, 129 Yeltsin, Boris, 85, 86, 91, 103 Yemen, 10, 216 yen, 32–33 YouTube, 167 Yugo, 161 Yugoslavia, 161 Zambia, 184 zero earnings, 3 Zille, Helen, 175–76 Zimbabwe, 4, 171, 173, 181 Zulus, 176 Zuma, Jacob, 176 Zynga, 239 More praise for Breakout Nations “A penetrating look at the countries he believes are likely to flourish, or fail, in the years ahead. . . .

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Marc Andreessen would swap the jeans he had worn on the cover of Time for a sports jacket, founding the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with his longtime colleague Ben Horowitz in 2009. Their firm would become an investor in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Lyft, and Airbnb. In an oft-quoted 2011 piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Andreessen explained how the capital needs of tech companies had changed: On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.

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the tenth largest economy: Charles E. Eesley and William F. Miller, “Impact: Stanford University’s Economic Impact via Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship 14, no. 2 (2018): 130–278, https://doi.org/10.1561/0300000074. “On the back end”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html. “most investments fail”: Dave McClure, “99 VC Problems but a Batch Ain’t 1: Why Portfolio Size Matters for Returns,” Medium, August 31, 2015, https://500hats.com/99-vc-problems-but-a-batch-ain-t-one-why-portfolio-size-matters-for-returns-16cf556d4af0.

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., xi, 187–88, 215 Tuskegee experiment, xxxi Twitter as digital civic square, 21 leaders surprised by ways the platform could do harm, 254 Trump’s access denied after January 6, 2021, xi–xii, 187–88 See also big tech platforms ultimatum game, 91 unicorns, 37–38, 39, 43 United Kingdom, 165, 218, 254, 260–62 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 173 United States Postal Service, 3–4 universal basic income (UBI), 182–84, 185 University College London Jeremy Bentham display, 120–21, 124 unsupervised data, 85 US Air Force Academy, 103 US Capitol assault (Jan. 6, 2021), xi-xii, xxvi, 115, 187, 209, 215, 223 US Census Bureau, 41 US Department of Justice (DOJ), 257 US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, 180 US security forces and message encryption, 128–29 USA PATRIOT Act, 116 user engagement in online platforms, 40 user-centric privacy, 149–50 utilitarianism, 9, 121, 168, 245 Vacca, James, 104–5 values overview, xvii, xxix balancing the competing values created by innovation, 240–43, 258 expressing ourselves in support of each other, 178 free expression, democracy, individual dignity at risk online, 190–91 freedom as, 172–73 goals assessment for evaluating efficiency vs. values, 15–16 replacing governance by big tech with process of deciding, xxix resolving trade-offs between rival values, xxxi–xxxiii, 45 at risk from new, unregulated innovations, 56 of tech leaders as expert rulers, 67–68 See also dignity, fairness, free speech, privacy, safety, security Varian, Hal, 174 venture capital, inequality in distribution of, 41 venture capitalists (VCs), 25–49 ecosystem of, 31–33 funding Soylent, 8 funds as investment vehicles for their LPs, 38–39 hackers and, 28, 52, 68 high value exits, 40–41 increasing numbers of, 39 narrow view of success as white, male, nerd, 41 optimizing from multiple starting points, 43–45 and scalability of businesses, xxviii and Silicon Valley, 17, 26–28 at Stanford showcasing their new companies, 42–45 unicorns, search for, 37–38, 39, 43 Vestager, Margrethe, 252–53, 255 virtual reality, the experience machine, 167–69 Waal, Frans de, 92 Wales, Jimmy, 195 Walker, Darren, 180 Wall Street Journal, 42–43 Warren, Elizabeth, 181, 256 washing machines and laundry, 157–58 watch time metric, 34 Watchdog.net, xxiii Weapons of Math Destruction (O’Neil), 98 Weinberg, Gabriel, 135–36 Weinstein, Jeremy, xv–xvi, 72 Weld, William, 130 Western Union, 57 Westin, Alan, 137–38 WhatsApp, 127–28 Wheeler, Tom, 63, 76 Whitt, Richard, 149 “Why Software Is Eating the World” (Wall Street Journal), 42–43 Wikipedia, 195–96 Wikipedia conference, xxiii–xxiv Wilde, Oscar, 63 winner-take-all, disruption vs. democracy, 51–76 overview, 51–53 democracy and regulation of technology, 68–73 democracy as a guardrail, 73–76 government’s complicity in absence of regulation, 59–63 innovation vs. regulation, 53–59 and Plato’s philosopher kings, 63–68 Wisconsin’s COMPAS system, 88, 98 Wong, Nicole, 40, 254 worker cooperatives, 180 workers’ compensation benefit, 55 workplace safety, 53–54, 55 World Economic Forum 1996, Davos, Switzerland, 25 World Health Organization, 154 World Wide Web, 29, 30.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

Foxconnn, Canon, they are only two of numerous examples. China is increasingly replacing its workers with robots, 54 and now even major newspapers are realising this. Just a few days ago (at the time of this writing), The New York Times came out with a 6-page piece entitled “The Machines Are Taking Over”,55 The Wall Street Journal says “Why Software Is Eating The World”,56 and I suspect these types of article will only increase in the near future. The trend is clear, companies in the manufacturing sector are automating, and the typical answer “people will find something else to do” is simply a cop-out that does not look at the reality of the situation – that change is happening too fast, and that most workers who will be replaced by machines will not have the time to learn new skills.

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http://singularityhub.com/2012/06/06/canon-camera-factory-to-go-fully-automated-phase-out-human-workers/ 54 China Is Replacing Its Workers With Robots, 2012. Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/credit-suisse-chinese-automation-boom-2012-8 55 The Machines Are Taking Over, Sep. 14, 2012. The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/how-computerized-tutors-are-learning-to-teach-humans.html 56 Why Software Is Eating The World, 2011. The Wall Street Journal. http://on.wsj.com/pC7IrX 57 In the TV series Star Trek, a replicator works by rearranging subatomic particles, which are abundant everywhere in the universe, to form molecules and arrange those molecules to form the object. For example, to create a pork chop, the replicator would first form atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc., then arrange them into amino acids, proteins, and cells, and assemble the particles into the form of a pork chop.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

We celebrate people who create jobs, but in the long run, we get richer by destroying jobs—by figuring out how to do the same amount of work with fewer people. This is not quite a paradox (because there’s an eventual solution to the problem, which we’ll get to). But for the people caught up in the destruction, it sucks. We live in a moment when this tension is acute—when, as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said, software is eating the world. Kayak and Expedia made it easier and cheaper for people to buy plane tickets—by putting travel agents out of business. Trucks driven by computers instead of people will make it cheaper to move goods around the country. As a result, it will be cheaper for us to buy stuff. So we’ll be able to buy more stuff, or to buy the same amount of stuff and save more money.

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The New York Times article about health inspectors and Edison’s smokestacks was quoted in Brilliant and was from an article published on January 17, 1911. Chapter 9 Many of the narrative details about the Luddites come from The Making of the English Working Class, by E. P. Thompson. Rebels Against the Future, by Kirkpatrick Sale, was also a useful source. Marc Andreessen published “Why Software Is Eating the World” as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The story about Roper selling his invention for £5 comes from The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830 , by R. S. Fitton and Alfred P. Wadsworth. Quotes from Luddite letters come from Writings of the Luddites, edited by Kevin Binfield. I also interviewed Binfield to get an overview of the era.

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Not just technology businesses: all businesses. Everyone from ESPN to Nike to Sears now offers APIs. Why? Because they recognize that they can’t do it alone, and perhaps because they’re looking at the world around them and seeing that it’s increasingly run by software. As Marc Andreessen noted in his Wall Street Journal op-ed “Why Software is Eating the World,” the world’s largest bookseller (Amazon), largest video service by number of subscribers (Netflix), most-dominant music companies (Apple, Spotify, and Pandora), fastest-growing entertainment companies (Rovio, Zynga), fastest-growing telecom company (Skype), largest direct marketing company (Google), and best new movie production company (Pixar) are all fundamentally software companies.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Again, there are plenty of old examples of this increasing-returns cost structure, for operating a steel mill or a power generation plant also involves very high fixed costs upfront and far lower marginal costs of producing one extra unit of steel or electricity. Increasing returns are everywhere now, though. Software is eating the world (Andreessen 2011), and software is costly to write and costless to reproduce and distribute. Almost all intangibles incur costs early, from marketing to build a brand to research and development in creation of new medications or treatments. Data itself can have large externalities and scale economies (Coyle et al. 2020).

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Leape, 2012, ‘What Economists Do and How Universities Might Help’, in Diane Coyle (ed.), What’s the Use of Economics?, London: London Publishing Partnership, 15–20. Anderson, Elizabeth, 1993, Value in Ethics and Economics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Andreessen, M., 2011, ‘Why Software Is Eating The World’, Wall Street Journal, August 20, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. Angrist, Joshua, Pierre Azoulay, Glenn Ellison, Ryan Hill, and Susan Feng Lu, 2020, ‘Inside Job or Deep Impact? Extramural Citations and the Influence of Economic Scholarship’, Journal of Economic Literature, 58 (1), 3–52.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Chapter 8: PAS DE DEUX 72 Roughly one third: Artturi Tarjanne, “Why VC’s Seek 10x Returns,” Activist VC Blog (blog), Nexit Adventures, January 12, 2018, http://www.nexitventures.com/blog/vcs-seek-10x-returns/. 74 Kalanick frequently compared: Amir Efrati, “Uber Group’s Visit to Seoul Escort Bar Sparked HR Complaint,” The Information, March 24, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-groups-visit-to-seoul-escort-bar-sparked-hr-complaint. 75 “Software is eating the world”: Andreessen Horowitz, Software Is Eating the World, https://a16z.com/. 75 deals increased by 73 percent: Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway, “How the Geography of Startups and Innovation Is Changing,” Harvard Business Review, November 27, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-the-geography-of-startups-and-innovation-is-changing. 75 billions invested post-2010: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City,” Startup Revolution, http://startupsusa.org/global-startup-cities/. 75 emerged as the world’s epicenter: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City.” 76 “to organize the world’s information”: “From the Garage to the Googleplex,” About, Google, https://www.google.com/about/our-story/. 76 controversial financial instrument: “The Effects of Dual-Class Ownership on Ordinary Shareholders,” Knowledge@Wharton, June 30, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-effects-of-dual-class-ownership-on-ordinary-shareholders/. 77 “An Owner’s Manual For Google Investors”: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “2004 Founders’ IPO Letter,” Alphabet Investor Relations, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html. 77 $3.5-billion acquisition: “Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook,” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-billion-acquisition-offer-from-facebook/.

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Using the tools of modern capitalism, they created software companies to improve our lives, while simultaneously wresting power away from lazy elites. The founders became the philosopher kings, the rugged individuals who would save society from bureaucratic, unfair, and outmoded systems. Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” Back then, technologists thought this was a good thing. Until recently, most of the rest of the world agreed. Venture deals increased by 73 percent from the early 2000s into the 2010s. The amount of global venture capital invested soared from tens of billions in 2005 into the hundreds of billions invested post-2010.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Hundreds of places around the world have rebranded themselves Silicon Deserts, Forests, Roundabouts, Steppes, and Wadis as they seek to capture some of the original’s magic. Its rhythms dictate how every other industry works; alter how humans communicate, learn, and collectively mobilize; upend power structures and reinforce many others. As one made-in-the-Valley billionaire, Marc Andreessen, put it a few years back, “software is eating the world.”4 This book is about how we got to that world eaten by software. It’s the seven-decade-long tale of how one verdant little valley in California cracked the code for business success, repeatedly defying premature obituaries to spawn one generation of tech after another, becoming a place that so many others around the world have tried and failed to replicate.

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And in the years immediately before and after Medvedev’s visit, it made a small group of people in Silicon Valley and Seattle very, very rich. THE POWER OF PLACE By the time Marc Andreessen took to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2011 to pronounce that “software is eating the world,” the new tech platforms were not only altering entire industries. They were transforming the geography of tech as well.4 Across North America and beyond, tech had inhabited a sprawling, suburbanized landscape of research parks and corporate campuses since the age of Eisenhower. It had continued to do so even as other white-collar industries and middle-class residents began returning to denser urban environments at the century’s end.

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Associated Press, “Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Microsoft Are Collectively Worth More Than the Entire Economy of the United Kingdom,” April 27, 2018, https://www.inc.com/associated-press/mindblowing-facts-tech-industry-money-amazon-apple-microsoft-facebook-alphabet.html, archived at https://perma.cc/HY68-RJYG [inactive]. 2. Reyner Banham, “Down in the Vale of Chips,” New Society 56, no. 971 (June 25, 1981): 532–33. 3. John Doerr, “The Coach,” interview by John Brockman, 1996, Edge.org, https://www.edge.org/digerati/doerr/, archived at https://perma.cc/9KWX-GLWK. 4. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, C2. Billions of dollars of public investment later, many of the would-be Silicon Somethings have fallen short of original expectations; see Margaret O’Mara, “Silicon Dreams: States, Markets, and the Transnational High-Tech Suburb,” in Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, ed.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Moreover, the speed and flexibility of software development allow companies to iterate and recover from the inevitable missteps of haste. What’s especially exciting these days is that software and software-enabled companies are starting to dominate industries outside of traditional high tech. My friend Marc Andreessen has argued that “software is eating the world.” What he means is that even industries that focus on physical products (atoms) are integrating with software (bits). Tesla makes cars (atoms), but a software update (bits) can upgrade the acceleration of those cars and add an autopilot overnight. The spread of software and computing into every industry, along with the dense networks that connect us all, means that the lessons of blitzscaling are becoming more relevant and easier to implement, even in mature or low-tech industries.

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In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.” Just over twenty years later, in 2011, the venture capitalist (and Netscape cofounder) Marc Andreessen validated Gilder’s thesis in his Wall Street Journal op-ed “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Andreessen pointed out that the world’s largest bookstore (Amazon), video provider (Netflix), recruiter (LinkedIn), and music companies (Apple/Spotify/Pandora) were software companies, and that even “old economy” stalwarts like Walmart and FedEx used software (rather than “things”) to drive their businesses.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Today, as software of what Wiener termed “the judgment-replacing type” moves from our desks to our pockets, we’re at last beginning to experience automation’s true potential for changing what we do and how we do it. Everything is being automated. Or, as Netscape founder and Silicon Valley grandee Marc Andreessen puts it, “software is eating the world.” 48 That may be the most important lesson to be gleaned from Wiener’s work—and, for that matter, from the long, tumultuous history of labor-saving machinery. Technology changes, and it changes more quickly than human beings change. Where computers sprint forward at the pace of Moore’s law, our own innate abilities creep ahead with the tortoise-like tread of Darwin’s law.

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Knopf, 1984), 67–71. 44.Noble, Forces of Production, 234. 45.Ibid., 21–40. 46.Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 148–162. 47.Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 251. 48.Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. Chapter Three: ON AUTOPILOT 1.The account of the Continental Connection crash draws primarily from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Accident Report AAR-10/01: Loss of Control on Approach, Colgan Air, Inc., Operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407, Bombardier DHC 8-400, N200WQ, Clarence, New York, February 12, 2009 (Washington, D.C.: NTSB, 2010), www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2010/aar1001.pdf.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

It’s a much more lavish meal than just Facebook swallowing journalism, I suggested. Corporations like Google and Facebook were once known, rather quaintly, as “internet” companies. But today they are rapidly becoming artificial intelligence companies and self-driving car companies and virtual reality companies. “Software is eating the world,” is how Marc Andreessen—the cofounder in 1994 of the first internet browser company Netscape and the original boy king of Silicon Valley—describes the way in which networked technology is feeding on almost everything and everyone else. Silicon Valley isn’t just the new Wall Street—it’s actually wealthier and more powerful than the old Wall Street, outspending the financial industry by two to one in Washington, DC, lobbying during the Obama administration’s eight years.35 Yes, we’ve seen this before.

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In the automotive industry, for example, one of the most pressing challenges for German car manufacturers is to determine where they will fit in the so-called software stack that will empower self-driving vehicles. In a new ecosystem driven, so to speak, by autonomous cars, their challenge is to avoid becoming the dumb commodified hardware at the bottom of the stack in an economy where, as you’ll remember Marc Andreessen saying, software is eating the world. So for Mercedes and BMW, the most dangerous long-term competition now comes from Silicon Valley. Their existential threat is that they could be eaten by Google’s, Tesla’s, or Apple’s algorithms, not by Toyota or Ford cars. In 2013, to hoots of condescending laughter from the digital cognoscenti, Angela Merkel, using language she might have borrowed from More’s Utopia, called the fifty-year-old internet Neuland—meaning “new land” or “uncharted territory.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

On August 8, “Black Monday,” the Dow Jones Industrial average dropped 635 points, the sixth-largest drop in its history up to that point. It was in this uneasy environment that Marc Andreessen, the inventor of Mosaic, the first major web browser, published an essay in the Wall Street Journal under a perplexing headline: “Why Software Is Eating the World.” By this point, there were really two economies: the digital economy and the material economy. Andreessen’s point was that the digital economy was becoming so powerful that it was dominating—eating up—the material economy. Increasingly, new companies were finding that they could use software to enhance their profits dramatically, expand their reach, and sell digital services rather than physical products.

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World Stars Global Equity fund: Irina Ivanova, “Amazon Makes $10,000 Per Second as Shoppers Shelter in Place,” CBS News, Moneywatch, May 1, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-q1-earnings-75-billion-10000-per-second/; see also Q1 Amazon net sales of $75.5 billion, $9,709 per second: “Amazon.Com Announces First Quarter Results,” https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2020/Q1/Amazon-Q1–2020-Earnings-Release.pdf. 99 over 9%: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rate 9.1 Percent in August 2011,” https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110908.htm?view_full. 99 an essay in the Wall Street Journal: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” August 20, 2011. 100 exceeded those of Hollywood and the music business put together: Video game industry revenues = $78 billion in 2010, $137 billion in 2019, see: Will Partin, “The 2010s Were a Banner Decade for Big Money and Tech—and Esports Reaped the Rewards,” Washington Post, January 28, 2020; Hollywood revenue = $42.5 billion in 2019, see: Pamela McClintock, “2019 Global Box Office Revenue Hit Record $42.5B Despite 4 Percent Dip in U.S.,” Hollywood Reporter, January 10, 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/2019-global-box-office-hit-record-425b-4-percent-plunge-us-1268600.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

Finally, make sure to check in with yourself and your co-founders to determine if you actually are still passionate about building a company in this new market or for this new customer. If you don’t see yourself following your vision for the next ten years, perhaps shutting down and returning investor money, if there’s any left, is a better idea. 7 WHAT AND WHERE? “Software Is Eating the World,” Marc Andreessen famously wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2011.1 Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and the world-renowned VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, highlighted a number of examples to prove his point: the world’s largest store, Amazon, was a software company; everyone was watching movies on Netflix; and the dominant music companies were iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora—all software makers.

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,” Quora, January 11, 2011, www.quora.com/What-is-the-genesis-of-Instagram. 5. Sarah Guo, “The Only Question That Matters: Do We Have Product-Market Fit?,” LinkedIn, April 10, 2020, www.linkedin.com/pulse/only-question-matters-do-we-have-product-market-fit-sarah-guo/?articleId=6654505667254202369. CHAPTER 7: WHAT AND WHERE? 1. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. 2. Root Insurance (@rootinsuranceco), “Why Are We Expanding in Columbus—and Not Somewhere Else?,” Twitter, May 21, 2018, 5:06 p.m., https://twitter.com/rootinsuranceco/status/998716673980018688. 3.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

After reading our book, you will have the tools to help your company avoid your own burning platform and thrive in this new era. 1 Platforms Are Eating the World When you truly see networks, it changes the way you plan and strategize. You move differently. —Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder of LinkedIn Software is eating the world. That was the message from former Netscape founder and renowned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in an op-ed he penned for the Wall Street Journal on August 20, 2011. In it, Andreessen made the case that software companies were about to become a cornerstone of the world economy. “We are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy,” he wrote.

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Geller, “Open Letter to BlackBerry Bosses: Senior RIM Exec Tells All as Company Crumbles Around Him,” June 30, 2011, http://bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-senior-rim-exec-tells-all-as-company-crumbles-around-him/. 20. Quoted in Hicks, “Research, No Motion.” Chapter 1: Platforms Are Eating the World 1. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. 2. Danny Wong, “In Q3, Facebook Drove 4X More Traffic than Pinterest,” Shareaholic Reports, October 27, 2014, https://blog.shareaholic.com/social-media-traffic-trends-10-2014/. 3.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

To enable us to better coordinate your addresses in the future, please provide your phone number, your digital image, and your finger print. Thank you. We also would like your mobile number. We value your cooperation. You also might wish to read a number of other books that our algorithm has selected on the basis of the online choices of people like you. These works explain how “software is eating the world,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has observed, and how Google’s search and other software constitute an “artificial intelligence” (AI) that is nothing less than “the biggest event in human history.” Google AI offers uncanny “deep machine learning” algorithms that startled even its then chairman, Eric Schmidt, by outperforming him and other human beings in identifying cats in videos.

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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires revised paperback edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). Yockey, Hubert. Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Periodicals Andreessen, Marc. “Why Bitcoin Matters,” The New York Times, January 21, 2014. Andreessen, Marc. “Why Software is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. Appelbaum, Binyamin. “Is Bitcoin a Waste of Electricity, or Something Worse?” New York Times, February 28, 2018. Arthur, W. Brian. McKinsey Quarterly, October 2017. Auspitz, Josiah Lee, “The Wasp Leaves the Bottle: Charles Sanders Peirce,” The American Scholar, 2001, 602–19.

Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal

AGPL, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, leftpad, Marc Andreessen, market design, Network effects, platform as a service, pull request, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software is eating the world, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Tragedy of the Commons, Y Combinator

We are lucky that developers have borne the hidden cost of these investments. But their initial investments only get us so far. We are merely at the beginning of the story of how software transformed humanity. Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and well-known venture capitalist behind the firm Andreessen Horowitz, observed in 2011 that software is eating the world. [205] Since then, that statement that has become canon for the modern age. Software affects everything we do: not just the frivolous and entertaining, but the mandatory and critical. OpenSSL, the project described at the beginning of this paper, demonstrates this well. In a phone interview, Steve Marquess explained that OpenSSL was used not just by consumer websites, but by the government, drones, satellites, any gadget you hear in the hospital beeping. [206] The Network Time Protocol, maintained by Harlan Stenn, synchronizes the clocks used by billions of networked devices and affects everything with a timestamp: not just messaging apps or email, but financial markets, medical records, and chemical processing.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

But new technologies that reshape our lives will also come from people and institutions well beyond the Big Five. Indeed, point to any part of modern life, and you can be fairly certain that someone, somewhere, is working away in a metaphorical garage, trying to develop a new system or machine to change it. In 2011, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.”5 In the years since, its appetite has indeed proven voracious. There are very few industries, if any, that new technologies do not find at least partially digestible. All corners of our lives are becoming increasingly digitized; and on top of our world of physical things we are building a parallel world of ones and zeros.

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For the “43 percent,” see “Amazon Accounts for 43% of US Online Retail Sales,” Business Insider Intelligence, 3 February 2017.   3.  Greg Ip, “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon,” Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2018.   4.  PwC, “Global Top 100 Companies by Market Capitalisation” (2018).   5.  Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, 20 August 2011.   6.  Connie Chan, “When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China,” Andreessen Horowitz, https://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/, quoted in J. Susskind, Future Politics, p. 331.   7.  Dan Frommer, “Microsoft Is Smart to Prepare for Its New Role as Underdog,” Quartz, 17 July 2014.   8.  

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If this vision for the next phase of Uber’s growth comes true, the landscape of America may well be rendered unrecognizable.4 And if all that is not enough, consider this observation by Kalanick: “If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes.”5 Anything at all? One wonders what limits can be set on Uber’s disruptive potential. Kalanick seems not to acknowledge any. A CAPSULE HISTORY OF DIGITAL DISRUPTION “Software is eating the world.” The slogan was originally used by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen in the title of a 2011 op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal to encapsulate how technology—particularly the Internet—has transformed the world of business.6 The story of Internet-enabled disruption as we’ve witnessed it so far has occurred in two main stages.

…

Zack Kanter, “How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million Jobs and Reshape the Economy by 2025,” CBS SF Bay Area, sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/01/27/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-will-destroy-10-million-jobs-and-reshape-the-economy-by-2025-lyft-google-zack-kanter/. 5. Swisher, “Man and Uber Man.” 6. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. 7. Phil Simon, The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business (Henderson, NV: Motion Publishing, 2011). 8. Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti, “Entry into Platform-Based Markets,” Strategic Management Journal 33, no. 1 (2012): 88–106. 9.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The firm launched at the start of a decade-long boom in equities, and especially in software firms; the advent of smartphones, cloud computing, and ubiquitous broadband ushered in a golden age for coders. Two strong partners with computer science backgrounds were ideally placed to capitalize on this moment, and they happily announced this fact. “Software is eating the world,” Andreessen proclaimed in a Wall Street Journal essay. The phrase brilliantly summed up the times. It surely explained more of a16z’s success than the public-relations hype about a new approach to technical founders. But the early years of a16z did feature a stealth innovation—one that was largely left out of the PR blitz.

…

Worldwide, a mere twenty-five million coders—one-third of 1 percent of the global population—were writing all the software that was transforming modern life. Anything that boosted the productivity of this small tribe would be immensely valuable. Predating Marc Andreessen’s declaration that “software is eating the world,” this last prepared-mind exercise became the springboard for a raft of Sequoia investments: Unity, a software development platform for 3-D movies and games; MongoDB, a database company; and GitHub, the leading repository for open-source code. By late 2020, Sequoia’s stakes in these three firms were worth a combined $9 billion.

…

., 93–96 origin story of, 17–21 Saxenian’s thesis on, 94–96, 389–90 Silver Lake Partners, 289, 297–98 Simon Personal Communicator, 20 Sina, 226, 233, 279–82 Singh, Shailendra, 321–24 Singleton, Henry, 53–54 SixDegrees.com, 20 Skype, 399 Accel Capital’s investment, 191, 251–52, 285–86 Andreessen Horowitz’s investment, 297–98 eBay acquisition of, 191, 297, 448n Silver Lake and, 297–98 Slack, 451n Slim, Carlos, 341 Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs), 41–43, 52, 61, 80, 395, 421–22n Smith, Hank, 86–87, 90 Snowflake, 330 Snow-Job, 69 social impact, 14–15 social networks. See networks SoftBank, 154–60, 171, 334 Alibaba, 229–31 Uber, 370–71 Webvan, 178 WeWork, 346–49, 370–73 Yahoo, 155–60 “software is eating the world,” 296, 309 Sohu, 226, 233, 279–82 Son, Masayoshi, 154–60, 171, 439n Alibaba investment, 229–31, 377, 446n background of, 154, 438n blitzscaling and, 387–88 “crazier, faster, bigger,” 348, 373, 385 Rieschel and, 222, 446n Uber investment, 370–71 Vision Fund, 155, 346–47, 459n WeWork investment, 346–49, 370–73 Yahoo investment, 155–60, 175, 277, 348, 439n Sony, 94 Soros, George, 199, 212–13, 283, 445n Soviet Union, 41, 289 SPAC (special purpose acquisition company), 373–74 SpaceX, 12, 214–15, 403 SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture), 107 specialization, 129–31 Spectrum Equity, 439n Sperling, Scott, 126–27 Spotify, 289, 399 “spread,” 336 Sputnik, 41 Square, 313 Squarzini, Joe, 139–41 SRI International, 433n stage-by-stage financing, 60, 76–77, 80, 81 Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500), 8–9, 25, 26, 64, 79, 298, 299, 333, 337 Stanford Business School, 5, 163, 305 Stanford Law School, 199, 208 Stanford Review, 199 Stanford University, 2, 17, 18, 96, 110–11, 199, 334, 340 Starbucks, 163, 170, 273–74 Stephens, Trae, 403 Stephenson, Tom, 432n Stevens, Cat, 375 Stevens, Mark, 302 Stewart, Martha, 179, 185 Stripe, 317–20, 332, 378, 388, 455n Stross, Randall, 166, 439n Sullivan & Cromwell, 226 Summit Partners, 325–30, 438–39n Sun, Ed, 447n Sun, Glen, 243–44 Sun Microsystems, 5, 51, 107, 123, 174, 186, 265 Supercell, 451n super-voting rights, 344, 346, 359–62, 371 Sutter Hill Ventures, 52, 66–67, 82, 96–97, 98, 102 Qume deal, 66–67, 98, 102, 103, 115, 184, 187–88, 290 Swanson, Bob, 72–78, 428n Swartz, Jim, 128–32.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.” Everyone expects computers to do more in the future—so much more that some wonder: 30 years from now, will there be anything left for people to do? “Software is eating the world,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has announced with a tone of inevitability. VC Andy Kessler sounds almost gleeful when he explains that the best way to create productivity is “to get rid of people.” Forbes captured a more anxious attitude when it asked readers: Will a machine replace you?

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

Ford Motors picked up an in-car music app startup called Livio.23 And there are plenty more examples. There’s even a newer startup that helps broker introductions between startups and acquirers, called Exitround. It has seen strong interest in non-tech corporations joining the marketplace and actively seeking acquisitions. ‘Their main motivation is realising that software is eating the world, and they have to add software talent and technologies to their products,’ explains Exitround founder Jacob Mullins.24 Mullins says that 20 per cent of acquirers on his site are public companies and 10 per cent of those are Fortune 500 companies. All this is great news for entrepreneurs – it can only create a more dynamic and exciting set of exit possibilities.

…

, article on Forbes.com, 8 July 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2013/06/08/facebooks-reality-check-death-by-a-thousand-snapchats/. 17 Kara Swisher, ‘Yahoo Tumblrs for Cool: Board Approves $1.1 Billion Deal as Expected’, article on AllThingsD.com, 19 May 2013, allthingsd.com/20130519/yahoo-tumblrs-for-cool-board-approves-1-1-billion-deal/. 18 Todd Wasserman, ‘Tumblr’s Mobile Traffic May Overtake Desktop Traffic This Year’, article on Mashable.com, 21 February 2013, mashable.com/2013/02/21/tumblr-mobile-traffic/. 19 Ibid. 20 Marc Andreessen, ‘Why Software Is Eating the World’, article on WSJ.com, 20 August 2011, online.wsj.com/news/articles/ SB10001424053111903480 904576512250915629460. 21 Leena Rao, ‘As Software Eats the World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups’, article on TechCrunch.com, 14 December 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/12/14/as-software-eats-the-world-non-tech-corporations-are-eating-startups/. 22 Alexia Tsotsis, ‘Monsanto Buys Weather Big Data Company Climate Corporation for Around $1.1B’, article on TechCrunch.com, 2 October 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/10/02/monsanto-acquires-weather-big-data-company-climate-corporation-for-930m/. 23 Leena Rao, 14 December 2013, op. cit. 24 Ibid. 25 Pitchbook, US, ‘VC Valuations and Trends’, 2014 annual report. 26 ‘Yesterday’s Big Payday for the IRS: 1600 Twitter Employees Now Millionaires’, research on PrivCo.com, 8 November 2013, www.privco.com/the-twitter-mafia-and-yesterdays-big-irs-payday. 27 Sven Grundberg, ‘“Candy Crush Saga” Maker Files for an IPO’, article on WSJ.com, 18 February 2014, online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304675504579390580161044024. 28 ‘UK Mobile Games Maker King Delays IPO Due to Candy Crush Surge’, article on VCPost.com, 9 December 2013, www.vcpost.com/articles/19437/20131209/uk-mobile-games-maker-king-delays-ipo-due-candy-crush.htm. 29 Phillipa Leighton-Jones, ‘Why Candy Crush Is a Success That’s Hard to Copy’, blog post on WSJ.com, 18 February 2014, blogs.wsj.com/money-beat/2014/02/18/why-candy-crush-is-a-success-that-cannot-be-copied/. 30 Mark Berniker and Josh Lipton, ‘Uber CEO Kalanick: No Plans To Go Public Right Now’, article on CNBC.com, 6 November 2013, www.cnbc.com/id/101175342.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Your Middle Class existence isn’t just being squeezed by overseas workers, it’s being squeezed by technology being developed just down the street. 2 The Acceleration of Technology All That Is Old Is New Again Venture capitalist firms are famous for their investment theses, the basic premise that fuels their investing strategy. These are simple statements which result in the investment of billions of dollars. Andreessen-Horowitz, a Venture capital firm started by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, that manages $4 billion as of March 2014, operates on an investment thesis of five words: Software is Eating the World. What is so profound in those five words that it directs how they invest billions of dollars? The trend Andreessen Horowitz is betting on may seem new and disruptive, but it’s just the next step in a well-understood process that’s been happening for hundreds of years: technological innovation.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

It was, when I look back on it now, a strikingly naive conversation, on their part and mine. And this points to some of the enormous challenges that tech companies pose for civic life, as the code they weave changes, inexorably, the way society works—including in ways the creators struggle to foresee. I could say, again, that software is eating the world, though it might be more accurate at this point to say it’s “digesting” it. But what’s noticeable also is the fact that size matters. These days, some of the biggest civic impacts come from the truly titanic, globe-spanning tech companies that sit in the midst of our social and economic life.

…

what you already “liked”: Clive Thompson, “Social Networks Must Face Up to Their Political Impact,” Wired, February 5, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2017/01/social-networks-must-face-political-impact. “divisiveness and isolation”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. “eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. trained machine learning: John Morris, “How Facebook Scales AI,” ZDNet, June 6, 2018, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-facebook-scales-ai/.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

In some respects it has already arrived. Over the last twenty years, India and the Philippines reaped the rewards of the telecoms revolution to create lower-skilled service sector jobs at call centres, and on technology helpdesks. Those jobs are now under threat. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, ‘Software is eating the world’. How many times have you talked to a computer recently, rather than someone with an Indian accent? A lot more than a few years ago, I would guess. Automated voice software is supplanting humans. India is thus being forced to upgrade. Its next generation of offshore jobs will be devoted to far more complex tasks, such as providing medical diagnoses, writing legal briefs, remotely supervising factories and plants, and doing consumer data analysis.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

You’ll notice he’s black and white, which makes this book a guide for navigating the Internet age successfully as well as a coloring book! What a deal! The Real Introduction to My Book The World Isn’t Flat; the World Wide Web Is In an August 20, 2011, op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, world-renowned venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world.”1 I couldn’t have said it better myself. Andreessen sets the stage: “With lower startup costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.”

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

The Alibaba Research Institute’s rural researchers continue to monitor manufacturing costs throughout the Chinese countryside as well as in the United States, citing the extensive investment Chinese companies are now undertaking in revitalizing rural American towns. Before I left his shop, the disgruntled shoe manufacturer kept saying, “It’s all a scam.” His words had the solemnity of a mantra. How to Eat the World “Software is eating the world,” declared Marc Andreessen in 2011, and in a sense, he was right. In a time of crisis, software has increasingly become the answer to help us build and support more efficient systems. The software industry has also been responsible for enormous inequality by accelerating other industries like rare earth mining and gig work.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Monopoly, control of our data, and corporate lobbying are at the heart of this story of the battle between creative artists and the Internet giants, but we need to understand that every one of us will stand in the shoes of the artist before long. Musicians and authors were at the barricades first because their industries were the first to be digitized. But as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has said, “Software is eating the world,” and soon the technologists will be coming for your job, too, just as they will continue to come for more of your personal data. The rise of the digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries in our country. I would put the date of the real rise of digital monopolies at August of 2004, when Google raised $1.67 billion in its initial public offering.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Companies see themselves as enlightened participants in these debates, with a social mandate as well as a business mandate; Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra encapsulates their belief that the company has a moral mission as well as a technological one. Internet culture is also supremely ambitious and self-confident. It’s a confidence captured in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s saying that “software is eating the world.” In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil).

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

His bosses at Goldman Sachs were old-school Wall Street types who had come up bellowing into telephones and jostling with other men in trading pits. And they didn’t like the new style of trading that was creeping into the finance industry, one that largely rewarded those who wrote the best algorithms. The prophecy of the famous West Coast venture capitalist (and future Coinbase board member) Marc Andreessen, “Software is eating the world,” was coming true. And it was going to swallow up those old-school traders. Even if they didn’t want to admit it. “They called the software engineers ‘IT’ and treated them as second class,” Fred recalls. “They had this aversion to automation. If I wanted to do something that could replace half the trading desk, they didn’t want that.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

Lyft And Interaction Failure 3.9 Interaction Ownership And The TaskRabbit Problem 4.0 SOLVING CHICKEN-AND-EGG PROBLEMS Introduction 4.1 A Design Pattern For Sparking Interactions 4.2 Activating The Standalone Mode 4.3 How Paypal And Reddit Faked Their Way To Traction 4.4 Every Producer Organizes Their Own Party 4.5 Bringing In The Ladies 4.6 The Curious Case Of New Payment Mechanisms 4.7 Drink Your Own Kool Aid 4.8 Beg, Borrow, Steal And The World Of Supply Proxies 4.9 Disrupting Craigslist 4.10 Starting With Micromarkets 4.11 From Twitter To Tinder 5.0 VIRALITY: SCALE IN A NETWORKED WORLD Introduction 5.1 Transitioning To Platform Scale 5.2 Instagram’s Moonshot Moment 5.3 Going Viral 5.4 Architecting Diseases 5.5 A Design-First Approach To Viral Growth 5.6 Building Viral Engines 5.7 The Viral Canvas 6.0 REVERSE NETWORK EFFECTS Introduction 6.1 A Scaling Framework For Platforms 6.2 Reverse Network Effects 6.3 Manifestations Of Reverse Network Effects 6.4 Designing The Anti-Viral, Anti-Social Network Epilogue Platform Scale (n): Business scale powered by the ability to leverage and orchestrate a global connected ecosystem of producers and consumers toward efficient value creation and exchange. PREFACE Eating The World In the late summer of 2011, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, opined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “software is eating the world.” Andreessen was referring to firms like Amazon and Google that displace traditional industry leaders with new business models. Ever since, the phrase has become a rallying cry for every new startup hoping to build the next big thing. Software has been around for several decades now, but its ability to “eat” the world – to disrupt and reorganize traditional industries – has become most apparent over the last decade and a half.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

If the insured parties are Google and a handful of massive competitors, then the negotiating position of the insurance companies will deteriorate sharply from the present situation where they are “negotiating” with you and me. Warren Buffet ascribes some of his enormous success as the world's best-known investor to his decision to avoid areas he does not understand, including industries based on IT. He has massive holdings in the insurance industry. Unfortunately for him, software is “eating the world”,[cciv] and a large chunk of the insurance industry is about to be engulfed in rapid technological change. Buffet acknowledges that when self-driving cars are established, the insurance industry will look very different, almost certainly with fewer and smaller players.[ccv] It is very hard to say which of today's players will be the winners and losers.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In a few years the firm became one of the most influential in Silicon Valley, investing in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Jawbone, Oculus VR, and many more. In a piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Andreessen summarized one of his key investment theses with a phrase that rings true to entrepreneurs and executives of companies under disruptive assault: “Software is eating the world.” The first paragraph of a widely shared article in 2015 on TechCrunch summed up the powerful pull of software-based platforms: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Three of the Four Horsemen—Apple, Facebook, and Google—have outstanding relationships with, and are a bike ride away from, a world-class engineering university, Stanford, and short drive to another, UC Berkeley (ranked #2 and #3, respectively).12 Many would argue the University of Washington (Amazon) is in the same weight class (#23). To be an accelerant you must have the raw material. Just as you used to build the electricity plant near the coal mine, the raw material today is top engineering, business, and liberal arts graduates. Tech—software—is eating the world. You need builders, people who can program software, and who have a sense for the intersection of tech and something that adds value to the enterprise and/or the consumer. The best engineers and managers for that task come from, in greater proportions, the best universities. In addition, two-thirds of the world’s GDP growth over the next fifty years will occur in cities.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

So why do companies keep searching for the fountain of youth, grasping at miracle cures? Right now most of them are scared to death. Their size used to be an advantage, but now it works against them. They’ve seen other companies that once seemed invincible get destroyed by the Internet—Blockbuster, Tower Records, Borders Books. They fear they will be next. “Software is eating the world,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once famously said, meaning that tech companies were no longer content to sell computers and software to other industries and instead intended to replace them. The media business has been nuked. Brick-and-mortar retailers are being wiped out so fast that people call it the “retail apocalypse.”

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Finally, according to Ericsson Research, within the next eight years we will see the next generation of mobile networks (5G) sporting speeds of five gigabits per second. Just imagine what that will make possible. When Marc Andreessen proclaimed in a 2011 Wall Street Journal article that “software is eating the world,” he was addressing this very phenomenon. Andreessen, who helped invent the Internet browser and is now one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists, argued that in every industry, and at every level, software is automating and accelerating the world. Cloud computing and the app store ecosystems are clear testaments to this trend, with the Apple and Android platforms each hosting more than 1.2 million applications programs, most of them crowdsourced from customers.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Thus unlocking technical talent is actually the key for businesses of every shape and size to compete in the digital era—so the Ask Your Developer mindset isn’t just a way of making developers feel appreciated, it’s a new way of operating to succeed in the digital economy. When Netscape founder Marc Andreessen wrote “Why Software Is Eating the World” in 2011, he created the catchphrase for the current migration of every business to software. But he didn’t articulate how exactly that would work. In fact, you might believe that just buying software was how this transformation would work. Or that the software would just eat the world on its own in some kind of Terminator-like hellscape.

Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

Although the use of the phrase “site up” and even the use of the term “site” within SRE hearkens back to the origins of the SRE practice, SRE work and skills are being employed on a growing basis to keep services, networks, internal and external-facing infrastructure, and products reliable. As “software is eating the world”4 and capabilities that were once the province of custom silicon move to horizontally scaled general-purpose hardware complemented with the right software, SRE practices become more important than chipset design or assembling the right constellation of unique hardware. For the sake of terminology, I will stick with the term “site” (or “website”) in this chapter, but please read that term in a widely inclusive sense.

…

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. London: Random House. 2 Tim O’Reilly, WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us 3 Lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement” (May 3, 1883), published in Popular Lectures, Vol. I, p. 73. 4 Marc Andreessen [paywall], “Why Software Is Eating The World”, republished at Andreessen Horowitz. 5 Peng Huang, Chuanxiong Guo, Lidong Zhou, Jacob R. Lorch, Yingnong Dang, Murali Chintalapati, Randolph Yao, “Gray Failure: The Achilles’ Heel of Cloud-Scale Systems” 6 Jude Karabus, “BA’s ‘global IT system failure’ was due to ‘power surge’”. 7 Gareth Corfield, “BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted”. 8 Cited by John Allspaw: Koen, Billy V. (1985).

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

The cost of cloud computing services continues to tumble, for instance. In the 1990s, at least, macro-economists could count on start-ups to invest their money in big, energy-sucking servers; now they can rent what they need from Amazon or Google at a fraction of the cost. Savings pile up; potential uses do not. Software is eating everything, and the creation of new software requires investments of time and social capital rather than mountains of money for plants and equipment. Capital is required for office space in social-capital-rich cities, however. But because of the continued difficulty in building new office space in such places, rising demand for offices in productive cities mostly pushes up real estate costs: London rent payments by technology firms become additional capital income and capital gains for the very rich, who spend too little of their marginal earnings to keep demand growing rapidly.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

If this pace of disruption has caught auto leaders or investors by surprise, they most certainly must have been out of touch in more ways than we can imagine. Meanwhile, few expected the computing power we have today and the pervasive impact of the internet and smartphones. Netscape cofounder and Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen noted in 2011 that “software is eating the world.” That prediction sure seems accurate. Few could have dreamed of the impact that software has already had. But that prediction was ignored by most and stands out as being unusually prescient. Even the best CEOs are kidding themselves if they think they can consistently predict more than a little bit forward.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Most of America was still grappling with what the pundits called “a jobless recovery” (whatever that meant), while the Bay Area lived in a bubble of exuberance and self-satisfaction. Google had just revealed its self-driving car project, Facebook was gearing up to go public, and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was coining the phrase “software is eating the world.” Sonja thought it was exciting to live in a place with so much optimism and easy employment, and when she heard people complain about how San Francisco was being murdered by runaway growth, she regarded them as ingrates who didn’t know or didn’t care what places like Philly and St. Louis looked like.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

I don’t know what all those other people will do now, but this isn’t work they can do anymore. It’s a winner-takes-all consolidation.”30 The evaporation of thousands of skilled information technology jobs is likely a precursor for a much more wide-ranging impact on knowledge-based employment. As Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” More often than not, that software will be hosted in the cloud. From that vantage point it will eventually be poised to invade virtually every workplace and swallow up nearly any white-collar job that involves sitting in front of a computer manipulating information. Algorithms on the Frontier If there is one myth regarding computer technology that ought to be swept into the dustbin it is the pervasive believe that computers can do only what they are specifically programmed to do.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The platforms have also used a variety of techniques to limit would-be competitors’ access to capital. In economic terms, Facebook, Google, and Amazon exploited their economic power to reduce competition. Regulators are reconsidering their hands-off policies. Past bragging by internet platforms—statements like “software is eating the world” and “data is the new oil”—has invited greater scrutiny. User data has value, even if users do not understand that to be the case. We know this because Facebook and Google are two of the most valuable companies ever created, and their businesses are based on monetizing user data. Harm is increasingly evident, and policy makers and regulators are taking notice.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

In 1930 it took only one kilogram: Sylvia Gierlinger and Fridolin Krausmann, “The Physical Economy of the United States of America,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 16, no. 3 (2012): 365–77, Figure 4a. from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000: Figures adjusted for inflation. Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. “Software eats everything”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer”: Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). subscribe to Photoshop: “Subscription Products Boost Adobe Fiscal 2Q Results,” Associated Press, June 16, 2015. Uber for laundry: Jessica Pressler, “‘Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry,’” New York, May 21, 2014.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

In the past, technological evolution posed threats to manual jobs. But as machine learning, neural nets, and AI continue to make significant and rapid strides, the threat is now faced by skilled personnel who were employed to perform cognitive tasks (Refer to Sidebar 3-1). As Marc Andreessen said, “Software is eating the world.” Today, software is increasingly threatening anyone whose job function involves a repetitive framework. With automation and financialization posing the biggest risks to industrialized economies, policies are needed that address the changes in productivity gains. Hence, it must be understood by policy makers that we have an ailing self-organized society that needs more direction in order to combat and adapt to the future technological changes.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

See John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), which describes pioneering IA work by Doug Engelbart and a long line of proteges. See also Doug Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (Washington, DC: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1962). 30. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. 31. Ryan Calo, “Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw,” California Law Review 103, no. 3 (2015): 513–563. 32. Ian Kerr, “Bots, Babes and the Californication of Commerce,” Ottawa Law and Technology Journal 1 (2004): 285–325. 33.

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

If the site had originally been built the way it is now, the engineers would have been able to join marketing’s party and pop a few champagne corks instead of popping fuses. Footnotes [81] http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html [82] http://www.arin.net Copyright © 2018, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Chapter 16 Adaptation Change is guaranteed. Survival is not. You’ve heard the Silicon Valley mantras: “Software is eating the world.” “You’re either disrupting the market or you’re going to be disrupted.” “Move fast and break things.” What do they all have in common? A total focus on change, either on the ability to withstand change or, better yet, the ability to create change. The agile development movement embraced change in response to business conditions.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It took decades of toil and sweat, and significant sums of capital, to go around the country and cobble together a network of refineries in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It took Mark Zuckerberg just eight years to build Facebook from nothing to a business with $100 billion in valuation—and just four more years to reach $300 billion. The big picture is that software is eating the world—that is, many of the products and services developed over the past 150 years are transforming into, or being disrupted by software…. The implications are enormous; software is infinitely replicable and, through the internet, can be delivered at zero marginal cost. When a major input to business—distribution cost—goes to zero, entire industries get disrupted [emphasis added].

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Michael Arrington asked me, “You’ve invested in a lot of great startups, how do you pick your companies?” I responded, “I trust my gut.” He seemed unsatisfied and told me, “You’ve got to come up with something better than that.” I’ve always admired the tech investors who construct a big, overarching thesis to frame their investment philosophy. “Software is eating the world,” “the bottom-up economy,” and “investing in thunder lizards,” to name a few. This type of theme investing is a great strategy for funds, but it never really applied to me as an individual angel investor. For me, the decision to invest in a startup comes after following a process that is heavily weighted towards EQ (emotional quotient).

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

But when Bill talks about educational delivery, what he is really talking about is running the schools….We are on a novel and maybe even revolutionary path. We are after the privatization of one of the largest public services in this country—the privatization of the public schools.” Since that time, the notion no longer seems so outlandish. As Mark Andreessen has famously said, “Software is eating the world.” It seems that big business, including Silicon Valley, is more determined than ever to devour public education and turn it into a monetized business. Whether the passionate, caring, hands-on Mary Graves of the world have a place in a world of private, for-profit schools, no doubt loaded to the hilt with technology, remains to be seen

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

active measures, Amazon Web Services, billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, blockchain, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, distributed ledger, Donald Knuth, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, exponential backoff, fake news, fault tolerance, finite state, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, full text search, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Hacker News, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kubernetes, Large Hadron Collider, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, no silver bullet, operational security, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, place-making, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, social web, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SPARQL, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, web application, WebSocket, wikimedia commons

Meadows and Diana Wright: Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-603-58055-7 550 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems [93] Daniel J. Bernstein: “Listening to a ‘big data’/‘data science’ talk,” twitter.com, May 12, 2015. [94] Marc Andreessen: “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, 20 August 2011. [95] J. M. Porup: “‘Internet of Things’ Security Is Hilariously Broken and Getting Worse,” arstechnica.com, January 23, 2016. [96] Bruce Schneier: Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. W. W. Norton, 2015.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

active measures, Amazon Web Services, billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, blockchain, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, distributed ledger, Donald Knuth, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, exponential backoff, fake news, fault tolerance, finite state, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, full text search, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Hacker News, informal economy, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, iterative process, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kubernetes, Large Hadron Collider, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, no silver bullet, operational security, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, place-making, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, social web, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SPARQL, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, web application, WebSocket, wikimedia commons

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