The End of the Beginning, Again

Benedict Evans

Editor’s note: It’s Summit Week at a16z, so each day we’re re-sharing some of our favorite talks from the last few years. a16z Summit is an annual, invite-only event bringing together thinkers, builders, and innovators to explore and examine the future of tech. Our 2019 theme is “The Future Is Inevitable,” and you can sign up here to get notified when we post this year’s talks.

In this talk on tech trends from Summit 2018, Partner Benedict Evans goes on a rapid fire tour of the future of tech, business, and innovation across industries and around the globe. He observes, most of the people are now online, but most of the money is (still) not. So what happens when that starts to change? What might the next wave of disruption look like for industries as massive and diverse as retail, finance, entertainment, transportation, and even death?

You can watch the full video of Benedict’s talk, or skip to particular sections, as outlined in the index below.

An index of topics and tech trends covered in the talk

How do we spend our money: Advertising vs Marketing (1:08)

Unicorns are born outside of the US (3:50)

Opportunities for companies in the next 20 years (6:48)

Retail as logistics vs retail as tastemaker (8:39)

How technology changes spending habits (11:48)

Software eats cars (13:32)

Software eats TV (14:44)

Software eats money (16:00)

Software eats death (17:43)

How machine learning creates layers of understanding (19:11)

How crypto builds meaning (21:50)