History rhymes: The Internet & Electricity
As I was zooming through the streets on my electric scooter, feeling like a ninja, it dawned on me how quickly the Internet is changing things and how much bigger it can get. You see, I wasn’t on a normal electric scooter, I was on a Scoot Networks scooter that is connected to the internet and is turned on by a smartphone.
The enabling technologies for me to use Scoot Networks have only come to market while Obama has been President.
Jeff Bezos is right, it really still is Day One for the Internet. The Internet’s maturity right now is comparable to where electricity was 100 years ago. We are now wired up and connected, but we’re just scratching the surface of how much will be done.
Electricity 100 years ago
A century ago, people used electricity for lighting in their homes. The light bulb was the initial killer application for electricity because it liberated people from candles as a necessity and enabled much more freedom with how people used their time. After cities and homes were wired so that light bulbs could be used, new innovations started to leverage the latent power that electricity offered.
Look around your home and you’ll notice some of these “later innovations” for electricity: blenders, toasters, ovens, washers, dryers, heaters, and TVs (to name a few).
The Internet today
We are in a similar place with the Internet today where most of us are now connected (~70% of USA). Over 2.5B people across the world are now connected.
The Internet’s initial killer application has been around communication and media (e.g. email). This area itself is still undergoing significant innovation with Snapchat, Wechat, Instagram, and Whatsapp all starting in the past 5 years and having a valuation of $10B+.
Today, billions of us are walking around with a pocket computer (smartphone) that has a persistent internet connection. We adopted smartphones super quickly so we could communicate via the internet wherever we went. Now that we have that constantmobile internet connection, we are doing more with it.
Marc Andreesen’s articulation that “Software Is Eating The World” is happening as we leverage internet connectivity for new uses:
- Airbnb for Hospitality
- Redfin for Real Estate Services
- BlueLight for Safety and Security
- Wealthfront for Financial Management
- Uber for Transportation and Logistics
All of the companies mentioned above were only started in the past 10 years, but they have a collective valuation over $50B. That value is impressive considering how little adoption these real-world services have had so far.
Comparing communication vs real-world use cases
You can see that the popular adoption of internet-powered, real-world use cases is still nascent compared to communication by just looking at Android download numbers:
Facebook versus Amazon. 1B vs 5M
Twitter versus Uber. 100M vs 10M.
Whatsapp versus Airbnb. 500M versus 5M.
We are still in the early, early innings of fully exploring all of the internet’s applications (haven’t even finished electricity yet). Hardware’s recent renaissance is foreshadowing how many more things the Internet will connect to. A fun question to to ask: What is the blender of the Internet?
Put another way, if you believe that software is eating the world, I think drinks have just been ordered in what is going to be a multi-course meal.
The next 20 years are going to be exciting. I’m stoked.
I’m the CEO of BlueLight. We’re bringing personal safety into the digital age.
