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my partner Albert was really really figured out that as we started consolidating there was going to be a need for small companies to have infrastructure that allowed them to compete more effectively with larger companies so things like MongoDB and Twilio or things that he led which nicely done I would have missed because I wasn't thinking in terms of you know how the consolidation was going to affect you know the applications layer
you're one of the few people that remember centralized services on the internet like AOL and CompuServe
over the years everything got sucked down into either the office suite or the operating system yeah and so that actually again paradoxically was good for consumers why because it standardized the interfaces that standardized the user experience at made it more accessible to more people interoperability like you have a word doc I have a word perfect we don't have to buy a third piece of software to translate it so it was good for consumers it was bad for innovation
so Linux became the dominant operating system on the browser side Microsoft couldn't open source windows couldn't compete directly for that business
what prevents them yeah I mean focus I guess would be the what we typically would say right like do they have the focus to focus on this and make it happen and sometimes they do sometimes they don't
Amazon Prime is kind of the catch-all for rabid consumers moving 90% of their purchasing to Amazon
what is Amazon's focus yeah it seems like they have to Amazon Prime and AWS
eventually we're gonna start to see you know players like Amazon you know being more and more aggressive in those markets that's gonna make it tough to you know tough to deliver a return
being able to direct demand to any supplier that you can negotiate with and then even to yourself that I think that's an incredibly powerful position and I guess their counter is well we only have the small percentage of overall commerce so therefore it's not a big deal and it's in the best interest of consumers because we're lowering prices
we've seen a number of examples where you know we've pioneered a market an opportunity of space a technology only to find that when one of these larger players enters that market it's really hard to compete they have huge advantages in terms of distribution
I think we are living in a world of very rapid consolidation around very dominant Network effects and that would be Google Apple Facebook Amazon these are great companies I have a great deal of respect for them but they have enormous advantage that's relative to startups
the new pixel phone always seems like they're just slightly better than the iOS devices
androids a little bit more open than Apple you know you could actually make the argument it may you know there are things about the openness in this world that you know end up being somewhat problematic
Google+ they couldn't focus their way to success way mo perhaps they will so Android they did
they're gonna go to a platform that they know can't be evil yeah they're not going to buy into building for Facebook for the seventh time and then have Zuckerberg pull the ball away like Lucy with Charlie Brown
I don't think there's anything wrong with that I just think that I mean that is the way capitalism works
you have these dominant players that are limiting innovation
we've seen a number of examples where you know we've pioneered a market an opportunity of space a technology only to find that when one of these larger players enters that market it's really hard to compete they have huge advantages in terms of distribution
I think we are living in a world of very rapid consolidation around very dominant Network effects and that would be Google Apple Facebook Amazon these are great companies I have a great deal of respect for them but they have enormous advantage that's relative to startups
we were the first and I think in the first institutional round of coinbase
we were investors in Twitter and early on Twitter was an open API yeah and so we had Tweety and TweetDeck and all those things and so you have these Twitter didn't have its own iOS or Android app right and so you have people building applications on top of an open database but when Twitter figured out that gosh we need a business model and the business models gonna be advertising so we have to come we have to you know control the way in which our content is being displayed all of a sudden it did
Twitter we were the only investor in the first round because everybody else had said you know if you get a deal with the carrier to pay for the SMS minutes and give you a business model then we'll look at it but nobody felt good about a hillarious