Welcome to a slice of Silicon Valley episode 22.
Last time we talked a bit about how 20 years ago, intel hired Outfit to help them craft a 20 year vision for their CEO's keynote work world. It's been 20 years. At that time there weren't smartphones, really wasn't even a lot of email. Most websites at that time were centralized. So you have Yahoo, Google, most of these companies, all the information went to a server and then it was sent out. In that way they have the ability to determine who was getting what use out of their platforms and they could charge them for it. Well, 20 years ago we felt that the best thing to do was to come up with a decentralized way for us to connect. We interviewed dozens of people and talked about what their social interactions might be. It started with family, friends, a little bit of business, and think of how you have meetings behind closed doors, you don't share those in public or you have family gatherings behind closed doors, you don't share those in public. So we really haven't understood how to traverse public in a private space. And we felt in order to understand that better, to set the right context. So you didn't end up advocating for ways to gain the system that would encourage more advertising or weaponize it for that. If it were decentralized, it would get a lot closer to how we as people wanted to interface with computing and how that was a better way for us to be able to have the technology with a seat at the table rather than being at the head of the table we should be. And so that was 20 years ago. There's been a lot who have explored and challenged and more recently we've gone through Web 20. Now we're coming up with Web Three, which is having a lot of challenges because people are figuring out how it can best serve us and it's good. There's pioneering going there, there's a lot of money being moved around, but through that will surface where there is value where there isn't, and there's a lot of history that tells us the third phase of something is where you really start understanding how to get benefit from it. So as we get beyond Web 2.0, I would advocate that we now have a platform. We have a platform that connects us people, we have a platform that connects services to serve us people and hopefully for us to find a way to have this technology serve us in a much better way. So I've had 20 years on the challenges associated with being too early. I've had 20 years to probe a number of services and ways we interact and hopefully we'll share some of those with you and it will help you be able to better adapt these rapidly changing ways that we're living our lives. Because technology is diffusing deeper and deeper into our lives. So thanks for joining. Hope to see you in Episode 23. Take care.