I recently started following Fred Wilson’s great blog, A VC, where he talks about technology, startups and where it’s all going. Fred is a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures in NYC, which has investments in companies like Twitter, Etsy, and foursquare to name a few. Check out their portfolio page for a full list.
Came across an older post on a talk he did at Google this past May. He talked about how technology is disrupting entrenched industries like media and how it has great potential to cause massive changes in other industries, specifically highlighting consumer finance, education, energy, health care and government.
I found the talk so interesting I actually started taking notes while I watched it. The video is about an hour long or if you want a quick summary my notes are below.
Lessons From Media
- The media industry is being significantly disrupted by the Internet.
- Power and control is shifting from institutions to individuals.
- This sounds obvious, but when you step back and think about it, I think it’s really significant.
- For example, before the Internet, think of how difficult it was for an individual to publish ideas for a large audience. Today with a blog I can make the same ideas available to a global audience essentially instantly all on my own for free.
- Startups don’t need as much capital to “take a shot” at large institutions because they can leverage a lot of free and relatively inexpensive technologies to get to market faster.
- Conversations on the web are exponential. A blog post or comment can be instantly propagated to a huge audience through various web services.
- Internet technologies are disrupting businesses that are not sustainable. Fred frames sustainable business as something that could go on forever.
- Key is to start small and solve a tiny piece of the problem first.
What’s next? Industries that are end to end digital.
Consumer Finance
- Peer to peer lending
- Virtual currency
- New banks, built from scratch
- Social, collaborative investing services
Education
- Open course content, lesson plans, curriculum, etc.
- This content will become commoditized.
- Aggregating existing content will be important for sourcing the best out there.
- Web will become even more important as a digital transcript to tell your story.
- Importance of a traditional diploma will decrease.
- The increasing cost of higher education vs. the financial gains of having the diploma will hit a tipping point and the system will bust.
- The web will be the textbook.
- Why pay publishers for books when the same information is online for free?
- What can be learned from the home schooling model?
Energy
- Smart grids will happen.
- Micro grids will allow people to sell surplus energy back into the grid.
- As more smart energy management devices are introduced into homes, businesses, etc. there will be a lot of data to analyze.
Health Care
- More challenging problems and not completely end to end digital.
- Doctor is the middleman.
- Digitizing health records and effectively sharing this information across systems and providers.
- Need to be able to securely share and collaborate with this data similar to ways emerging in social media.
- Someone is going to get this right and the flood gates will open for development.
- People are using the web and its resources to find answers to health problems outside of traditional health care systems.
- Meetup example about people forming groups around specific health problems.
Government
- Communication channels in government need to become more open.
- The White House’s site is taking a more open and social approach.
- SeeClickFix example.
- See it happening at the local level first.
- NYC Data Mine is opening up data from New York government agencies to view and use for development.
- Sponsoring the NYC Big Apps contest.
- Washington DC is doing something similar with Apps for Democracy.
- NYC Data Mine is opening up data from New York government agencies to view and use for development.
