Rajesh Jain

Resetting ESP and Adtech Industries (Part 3)

Creative Destruction

What we have termed as the resetting of industries has been around for a long time – this was what created prosperity for billions of people and some nations in the past 250 years, starting with the Industrial Revolution. Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” in 1942. Investopedia explains: “Schumpeter characterized creative destruction as innovations in the manufacturing process that increase productivity, describing it as the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. Basically, the theory of creative destruction assumes that long-standing arrangements and assumptions must be destroyed to free up resources and energy to be deployed for innovation. To Schumpeter, economic development is the natural result of forces internal to the market and is created by the opportunity to seek profit.”

ChatGPT: “[It] is the process by which new innovations and technologies replace old ones, leading to the destruction of existing industries and business models. It refers to the phenomenon of how new and innovative ideas can disrupt and displace established ways of doing things. The idea behind creative destruction is that economic progress and growth are driven by the continuous cycle of innovation and obsolescence. When new technologies and ideas emerge, they often render existing products, industries, and ways of doing things obsolete. This can lead to the decline and eventual disappearance of established businesses and industries, but also creates opportunities for new businesses and industries to emerge… Creative destruction is a fundamental aspect of capitalism, where competition and innovation are the driving forces of economic growth. While it can be painful for those affected by the destruction of established industries, it is ultimately a necessary process for the economy to continue to grow and evolve.”

Examples abound. From ChatGPT:

The development of the automobile industry in the early 20th century disrupted traditional modes of transportation such as horse-drawn carriages and trains. This led to the creation of new industries such as car manufacturing, road construction, and gas stations.
The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century disrupted traditional modes of communication such as telegraph and mail. This led to the creation of new industries such as telephone manufacturing, infrastructure development, and phone book publishing.
The emergence of mass production techniques in the early 20th century disrupted traditional craft production methods, leading to the decline of artisanal trades such as shoemaking, furniture making, and tailoring. This also created new opportunities in manufacturing and assembly line production.
The development of radio and television broadcasting in the mid-20th century disrupted traditional forms of entertainment such as live theater and cinema. This led to the creation of new industries such as broadcast media, advertising, and program production.
The advent of digital photography has disrupted the traditional film photography industry, leading to the decline of companies like Kodak and the rise of digital camera and smartphone manufacturers.

China along with other East Asian countries disrupted manufacturing globally riding on the globalisation wave. Indian IT services companies did the same with their outsourced software development model. The pace of creative destruction and digital disruption has increased in the past few decades, as I wrote in “The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime”.

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Gerd Gigerenzer: “One of the insights in my research at the Max Planck Institute is that if you have a situation that is stable and well defined, then complex algorithms such as deep neural networks are certainly better than human performance. Examples are [the games] chess and Go, which are stable. But if you have a problem that is not stable—for instance, you want to predict a virus, like a coronavirus—then keep your hands off complex algorithms. [Dealing with] the uncertainty—that is more how the human mind works, to identify the one or two important cues and ignore the rest. In that type of ill-defined problem, complex algorithms don’t work well. I call this the “stable world principle,” and it helps you as a first clue about what AI can do. It also tells you that, in order to get the most out of AI, we have to make the world more predictable.”

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: “The essence of learnability is intellectual curiosity. It has to do with having a hungry mind. It’s your desire and propensity to want to understand things, to go beyond superficial answers, and to dig deeper to understand the causes of things, deep down. It makes sense, as I highlight in the book, that in an age where all of the knowledge of the world—which seems very hard to quantify or even grasp—has been outsourced and can be crowdsourced, accessed, and retrieved on an on-demand, 24/7 basis, there is really no advantage in being knowledgeable. Rather, the advantages come from asking questions and being hungry enough for knowledge that you actually leverage access to this information.”

Donald Boudreaux: “The market’s biggest failure is not that it occasionally ‘fails’ in those ways tediously described in economics textbooks; instead, the market’s biggest failure is that it works so successfully, smoothly, and quietly that people take its output for granted. The market thus conveys the appearance or sensation that wealth and economic growth ‘just happen.’ But, of course, wealth doesn’t ‘just happen.’ It must be produced. Daily. With creativity. Careful attention to details, including to the desires and quirks of fellow human beings as well as, of course, to prices. Risk-taking. Hours of toil, often long ones.”

McKinsey: “Which internal businesses or projects merit company capital? Managers frequently employ enterprise value multiples as a key yardstick. However, when evaluating potential strategies more comprehensively, it’s essential not to rely on multiples alone or even primarily. The goal of strategy is maximizing long-term value, not optimizing multiples. Multiples are the result of good outcomes, but they are not the primary objective. Sometimes companies miss this essential point.”

Resetting ESP and Adtech Industries (Part 2)

When Industries are Reset

In a 2015 post, Benedict Evans wrote: “Sometimes, an entire industry gets reset to zero, and all the entrenched advantages and parameters go away. The iPhone had that effect, and so did HMS Dreadnought… It was launched by the Royal Navy in 1906 and was the first modern battleship, such that all previous battleships are known retrospectively as ‘pre-dreadnought’. Amongst other innovations, it was the first to have turbine engines and the first to have a single large-calibre battery. Rather like the iPhone, it contained few things that were fundamentally new – most of the key features had been around for a while and considered elsewhere – but it was the first to put all of them together in one place in the right way, and, like the iPhone, this changed everything. Every other warship afloat was obsolete… This is rather what the iPhone did, to both the mobile business and the entire consumer technology industry. All the existing parameters and entrenched advantages went away and the whole market was reset to zero.”

I asked ChatGPT for an explanation on what “resetting the score” meant: “”Resetting the score” is a metaphor that is often used in the context of innovation to describe a situation where a new innovation or technological breakthrough disrupts an existing industry, causing a shift in the balance of power between incumbents and newcomers. The metaphor implies that the old “score” or established way of doing things is no longer valid, and that a new score or set of rules is needed to reflect the changed landscape.”

In another post in 2020, Benedict Evans wrote: “When Steve Wozniak created the original Apple I in 1975, IBM dominated the computing industry. It was nicknamed ‘Big Blue’, it was so far ahead of its competitors that people talked about ‘IBM and the seven dwarves’, and it had just come through yet another anti-trust case. IBM’s dominance, of course, was based on the mainframe, which was the central paradigm of the computing industry, and it had sealed its dominance just a decade earlier with the launch of the 360 system. However, over the next decade it became obvious that the flood of PCs that followed the Apple 1 were going to overtake the mainframe. All of the focus of innovation, investment and company creation moved to the PC. Indeed, PCs created the very idea that software could be a separate industry, and not just something that was bundled with your hardware. Microsoft, not IBM, dominated the PC ecosystem, and so Microsoft became the centre of the tech industry – it became the new sun in the solar system.” He added: “The competition [is] something that solves the same underlying user needs in very different ways, or creates new ones that matter more. The web didn’t bridge Microsoft’s moat – it went around, and made it irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t limited to tech – railway and ocean liner companies didn’t make the jump into airlines either. But those companies had a run of a century – IBM and Microsoft each only got 20 years.”

These two posts, the recent developments in search, the changes forced by the pandemic for many industries, and my own thinking about AdWaste (half of the $400 billion being spent on adtech – primarily Google and Meta – is being wasted) made me wonder if the idea of an “industry reset” could be applied to the work I (via Netcore) have been doing. But before I get to that, let’s look deeper into the reset of industries, a process first explained by Joseph Schumpeter.

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Jensen Huang on AI’s iPhone moment: “There are five million applications in app stores, there are probably several hundred PC applications, there’s 350,000, maybe 500,000 websites that matter — how many applications are there going to be on large language models? I think it will be hundreds of millions, and the reason for that is because we’re going to write our own! Everybody’s going to write their own. This is a phase shift, a difference, an inflection point, a different way, there’s definitely a new computing model here, this is profound. We’re going to look back and we’re going to say “Hey, guess what, we were there”. The day this thing came to realization we were all there, we internalized what it meant to us, and we took advantage of it. A lot of companies are asking themselves, “What does this mean? What does this mean to us? What does this mean to our industry? What does this mean to our competition? What does this mean to our products? What does this mean to our business model?” This is happening right now as we speak, a very big deal, a really really big deal.”

Shankkar Aiyar: “India faces a water crisis of untold magnitude. There is the rolling spectre of the El Nino effect – which haunts this year’s monsoon – and there is the long-term stress and scarcity scenario..The World Water Development Report 2023…states that the global urban population facing water scarcity will touch 2.4 billion – and “India will be the most severely affected country”.”

WSJ: “Conversation, when it is performed for an audience, has a structure and order that is impossible in real life…The unscripted interview or talk show is perhaps the closest we can come to the performance of authentic conversation. Unfortunately, most such shows are either trivial in subject matter or hew obsessively to a party line. For entertaining conversation in this format, we have to go back in time to the golden age of the talk show, overseen by Jack Paar, Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson. Between 1965 and 1980, Carson’s show, for example, lasted 90 minutes—a very long time—and he would interview authors in the last half hour, resulting in some memorable conversation. Although I’m not much of a sports enthusiast, I see the closest approximation to these veteran conversationalists in shows like “Inside the NFL” and “Inside the NBA,” where ex-players parse a game with the same laser precision with which literary scholars analyze “Paradise Lost.””

FT: “The idea that there could be “another me”, a doppelgänger or identical copy of oneself, has long had a powerful hold on the popular imagination. Now, science is beginning to breathe glimmers of reality into the concept, at least in digital form. In Virtual You Peter Coveney, professor of chemistry and computer science at University College London, and Roger Highfield, science director at London’s Science Museum, show how far researchers have got in their quest for accurate digital simulations of humans in general — and of particular individuals. The prospect is for personalised medicine far more accurate than the primitive version based on genetics that is available today. Your digital twin will predict accurately your risk of disease and recommend drug, diet and lifestyle changes to extend your healthy lifespan. There may also be troubling questions if the technology permits really reliable “healthcasts”; do you want a precise forecast of how and when you will die?”

Resetting ESP and Adtech Industries (Part 1)

Search Wars

OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, its partnership with Microsoft, and the subsequent integration of GPT into Bing has upended the Search industry, long monopolised by Google. Google has replied with Bard. At stake: $200 billion of ad revenue. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put it (referencing Google) in an interview to The Verge after the Bing announcement, “Today was a day where we brought some more competition to search. Believe me, I’ve been at it for 20 years, and I’ve been waiting for it. But look, at the end of the day, they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this. That is what they are. And I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance.”

Jaspreet Bindra added context:

The First Search Wars started 14 years back, when Steve Ballmer and Microsoft launched the search engine Bing to take on Google. Google had annihilated other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite to become a virtual monopoly, through a combination of superior search results and a profit-spinning business model.

Much like the First World War, the Bing-Google search war was a grinding battle fought in the trenches of technology. Google emerged victorious, still controlling more than 90 per cent of the search market, besides overtaking Microsoft in revenues and profitability. Microsoft vowed to soldier on, and Bing still exists, though as a very poor second alternative. Therefore, the undisguised glee in Nadella’s tone when he declared the Second Search Wars.

… Search advertising is extremely profitable for Google, and Microsoft now wants to attack it squarely. Nadella said as much in an interview with Financial Times: “From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever…There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all.” It is this “asymmetric” competition which is enabling Microsoft’s jujutsu move. As Microsoft drives overall search margins down, it hits Google asymmetrically. That potentially impacts Googles investments in other businesses, including cloud, where it is locked in a ferocious battle with Microsoft for the number two position. Google has been subsidising its cloud growth with its search profits, and that tap could dry up. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps making its money through its software and gaming businesses, offsetting its minuscule search losses. This is the ‘3D chess game’ that Microsoft is playing, a genius move in strategy.

The Economist wrote: “[N]othing lasts for ever, particularly in technology. Just ask IBM, which once ruled business computing, or Nokia, once the leader in mobile phones. Both were dethroned because they fumbled big technological transitions. Now tech firms are salivating over an innovation that might herald a similar shift—and a similar opportunity. Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) let users gather information via typed conversations. Leading the field is ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, a startup… As in the 1990s, when search engines first appeared, a hugely valuable prize—to become the front door to the internet—may once again be up for grabs.”

What is happening in Search has happened many times in the past – new technologies and innovations have upended incumbents, resetting industries. In this series, I will look back at some other examples and peer into the future and ask if that could happen to email service providers (ESPs) and in the adtech industry.

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Economic Times: “According to Buffett, playing it too safe will not result in wealth creation. Mistakes are an integral part of the investment journey, and the important factor is how quickly you realize your mistake and trim your losses. Cutting weeds, or dead stocks, is critical for portfolio growth. If your money is stuck in dead stocks, your overall portfolio will not outperform. Therefore, as an investor, you must be willing to accept and learn from your mistakes for long-term success…Buffett advises investors not to attempt to increase allocations to stocks that have fallen, as they may find themselves catching falling knives. Instead, they should focus on stocks with strong fundamentals and growth potential. If they continue to invest in weeds, their portion in the portfolio will keep rising, hindering overall performance.”

Andrew McCarthy: “Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step. Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more…The great naturalist John Muir keenly observed, “I only went out for a walk and … going out, I found, was really going in.” Has anyone ever emerged from ambling through nature for an hour and regretted their improved state of being? Perhaps this is what that dedicated walker Henry David Thoreau was referring to when he wrote, “I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” So the secret is out there. It’s under the leaves on the trail. It’s right there on the sidewalk.”

John T. Reed: “When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.” [via Shane Parrish]

NYTimes: “It’s important to understand that while a midday nap will probably replenish your energy enough to get you through your day, said Rebecca Spencer, a sleep science researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it won’t necessarily negate the health risks that may come with insufficient sleep at night…Not only is the length of time you sleep important for health, Dr. Spencer said, but also the quality of that sleep, which is determined by how much time you spend in its different stages.”

Ruchir Sharma: “More than low interest rates, the easy money era was shaped by an increasingly automatic state reflex to rescue — to rescue the economy from disappointing growth even during recoveries, to rescue not only banks and other companies but also households, industries, financial markets and foreign governments in times of crisis. The latest bank runs show that the easy money era is not over. Inflation is back so central banks are tightening, but the rescue reflex is still gaining strength. The stronger it grows, the less dynamic capitalism becomes. In stark contrast to the minimalist state of the pre-1929 era, America now leads a rescue culture that keeps growing to new maximalist extremes.”

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 7)

Future

Many years ago (2004), I had written about my Kumbh Mela Cycle theory – that big innovations in computing come every 12 years or so: “1945 saw the invention of the world’s first computer, the ENIAC. In the late 1950s, IBM switched from using vacuum tubes to using transistors, and also launched Fortran. In the early 1970s, we had the invention of the microprocessor, along with Unix and the relational database. In 1982-83, the personal computer was launched by IBM. In 1992-94, we had Wintel come into being, with the launch of Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the Intel Pentium. It also saw the creation of Mosaic, the graphical web browser, and the start of the proliferation of the Internet.” Almost two decades later, the cycle has (sort-of) continued: 2007 saw the launch of the iPhone, and in the late 2010s and early 2020s, we started seeing the rise of Generative AI.

Going forward, I think the Kumbh Mela Cycle will probably be compressed given the rapidity of innovation that is happening in multiple disciplines simultaneously. Even as it has been an amazing ride in my 56 years lifetime, tomorrow’s world promises a lot more. As consumers, business owners and managers, researchers and entrepreneurs, we will see many new and exciting technologies in our lives, with the promise of many more revolutions in the years and decades to come. Here is some crystal-gazing.

From my vantage point, there are two revolutions which will have a huge impact for consumers and businesses:

AR/VR (augmented reality and virtual reality): this may or may not lead to the metaverse and is taking longer to come to life, but it will transform how we communicate, play, socialise and get entertained. It is one innovation away – just like ChatGPT brought the 50 years of AI innovations to life.
Martech: this will shift focus from new customer acquisition (a $400 billion industry with half of it as AdWaste) to existing customers, and empower both brands and consumers at the cost of Big Adtech. I have written about this extensively.

ChatGPT’s response about the future digital revolutions (which I have edited lightly, and have also removed duplicates from earlier lists):

Virtual and Augmented Reality
5G
Blockchain, which is expected to lead to new applications in fields such as finance, supply chain management, and digital identity
Quantum Computing, which will enable breakthroughs in fields such as cryptography, simulation, and optimization
Autonomous Systems, such as autonomous vehicles and drones, which is expected to greatly increase efficiency and safety in transportation, delivery, and other industries
Edge Computing, which involves processing data closer to the source of the data rather than in centralized data centers
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is a form of AI that mimics human intelligence
3D Printing, which is expected to greatly increase the efficiency and flexibility of manufacturing, as well as enabling new applications in fields such as bioprinting and space exploration
Digital Twins, which are virtual representations of physical objects or systems
Wearables, which will improve our ability to monitor and track our health, as well as enable new forms of entertainment and communication

Here is Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech (2022):

All this is just in the narrow world of the computing and digital ecosystem. Technology, defined broadly by Atanu Dey as know-how, or “knowledge of how to do”, continues to impact every sphere of life and business. So, lots to look forward to, and a great time to be an entrepreneur. Imagine, Innovate and Initiate!

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WSJ on the technology skills every employee should have: “An explosion of analytical, organizational and communication technologies is remaking every aspect of office work. Whether people work in sales, marketing, project management, design or many other fields, employers expect them to manipulate and analyze data, and bundle it into slick presentations. And as remote work has become the norm, people must know the advanced features of online collaboration. “There is no debate as to whether technology is not just an enabler, but is really a driver of disruption, of change, of value, within organizations,” says Columbia Business School dean Costis Maglaras. “And as a result, [there] needs to be some core knowledge that people need to bring with them, even if they’re not going to be technologists themselves.”

WaPo: “Lentils conceal their superpowers with a dowdy exterior. Pound for pound, raw lentils have more protein than steak. While not as protein-dense once cooked, they pack even more iron than meat, in addition to other vitamins and minerals.”

Azeem Azhar: “AI is the real Web 3…I believe large language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are the future of the web. Web2 has transitioned from a social web to one ruled by major online aggregators like Facebook. For the past few years, the search for Web3 has been focused on building a data model on the blockchain. Despite its promise, adoption has been slow, and developers in the Web3 space face regulation challenges due to some dubious claims and behaviours. In contrast, AI’s rapid improvement has led to the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and new behavioural interactions across the internet. These models have immense potential to revolutionize how we access and use information online. For example, even though products like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are still in development, they are already being used more than blockchain-based Web3 products for practical day-to-day purposes. I have gotten more done using ChatGPT than I ever did on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.”

Economist: ““Games, even before video games, were a way for people to meet one another and spend time together socially,” says John Hanke, Niantic’s chief executive. “So when you talk about getting people together through some electronic mediation, games are already a natural fit.” As interactions are more electronically mediated, gaming touches all corners of life. “Perhaps one day, we won’t even have the term ‘gamer’,” says Jim Ryan, chief executive of Sony’s gaming division, “because everyone will play in some form or other.”” More: “When video games were just electronic toys, this might not have mattered. But as games expand and spill into other formats, it is becoming clear that whoever dominates gaming is going to wield clout in every form of communication. In every sense, the future of the media is in play.”

The Digital Revolutions in My Lifetime (Part 6)

SaaS

The cloud has transformed our lives – email, files, photos are all stored on servers rather than our own devices. Many of the services we use would not have been possible had it not been for the cloud. For enterprises also, software has started moving from the enterprise LAN to the cloud. Netcore has had SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings for many years – though for the early years, we did not think of ourselves as a SaaS company.

The mindset shift happened when Kalpit (Netcore’s CEO) and I attended SaaStr, a conference in San Jose, in February 2019. As I wrote a couple of years ago: “Software developers wanted APIs that they could integrate into the code they were writing without having to talk to salespeople. For this, the product needed a self-serve and perhaps even a free trial. This needed a new approach to product development and sales. It needed targeting developers – which needed a very different approach then meeting CIO and CMOs. The SaaS way of marketing and sales was also different – a new world of SDRs (sales development representatives) and ABM (account-based marketing) was enabling companies to reach out globally without a physical presence in multiple countries. The primary metric was not annual sales but MRR (monthly recurring revenue). There was a new language of business that had fuelled a new generation of companies – and we were oblivious to both the vocabulary and the competition. SaaStr opened my eyes to this new world. And the question that kept coming to me was – why had I not seen it earlier? A few knowledgeable colleagues had told me about the new world of SaaS – I ignored them repeatedly. I did not recognise that a new set of decision-makers were emerging in enterprises – developers, product managers. I also failed to recognise that a new class of companies was emerging – aggressive, exponentially growing startups. I was still locked to a worldview that sales and marketing of our solutions had to be via face-to-face connect in large organisations.”

We have now brought in the SaaS approach to every aspect of our business. Netcore has grown to $100 million ARR, through a mix of organic expansion and acquisitions. SaaS is the one revolution I was late to recognise, but did not miss. We are now in the thick of the action with many new ideas around CPaaS – hotlines with Email 2.0 (AMP) – and Martech – unified stack and site search for omnichannel personalisation. The ProfitXL [LINK] focus is what can help Netcore expand its footprint globally.

As I look back, the computing revolution changed the direction of my life, the Internet revolution gave me my first success, the mobile revolution was what I missed, and the SaaS revolution has given me the foundation to build an enduring, great company. An entrepreneur’s life is about climbing mountains beyond mountains; at age 56 I am fortunate to have climbed many even though I stumbled on a few. I have seen amazing changes in digital technology through my lifetime, and I am sure I will see many more in the future.

Thinks 832

FT on war games: “Due to their close resemblance to real conflict experience, games offer compelling evidence for policymakers facing difficult choices. Indeed, they can be such powerful devices of influence that organisations have been known to change rules to sway outcomes and leak the results when it benefits their cause. A game designed to answer a question — who would win a war over Taiwan? How would American support for Ukraine affect the war? — needs five qualities. It needs to be believable, it needs the right players with the correct expertise and demographics, and there must be enough players and game iterations to come to realistic conclusions. The best war games control for bias within their scenarios and rules. Good data collection is vital.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “The root cause of the milk shortages isn’t even being talked about. The Bangalore Milk Union president admitted that “many small milk producers have given up on rearing cows as it has become unsustainable”. Though he doesn’t mention the underlying reason for this change, the bans on cow slaughter and recent attacks on people transporting cattle surely have reduced the incentives for farmers from stepping into this minefield called milk production.”

Shane Parrish: “Things you control: Your effort. Your beliefs. Your actions. Your attitude. Your integrity. Your thoughts. The food you eat. How kind you are. How reflective you are. How thoughtful you are. The type of friend you are. The information you consume. The people you surround yourself with.”

Martin Casado: “Generative AI is a very different type of system. The cost of creating something new now is very, very cheap. For example, look at these large image models. If you’re like, “OK, so I’m Martin.” If you enter the prompt, “Martin in the Alps, drinking a martini with an alpaca,” the cost to create that is about one one-hundredth of a penny. This is relatively new technology, and relatively unoptimized technology. If you compare that generation, that one one-hundredth of a penny, to hiring a designer or going on Photoshop or, God forbid, flying to the Alps, you’re talking about four or five orders of magnitude in difference in cost, the time to create that. And that’s very rare in my 20 years’ experience doing—to have four of five orders of magnitude of improvement on something people care about. The way that I think about it is: The creation of the microchip brought the cost of compute, the marginal cost of compute, to zero. And with the internet, and with software, the marginal cost of distribution went to zero, meaning you can reach anybody. And that’s why software businesses are these 80%-margin businesses. I think there’s a chance that with these generative things, not traditional AI, the marginal cost of creation can converge on zero.”