Network effects are central to our investment thesis at USV. We believe that they provide one of the few (the only?) source of sustainable competitive advantage. We have also been outspoken about wanting to limit the power that these network effects provide to winning companies. One proposal that I have made is to shift more power to the edge of the network by giving humans the right to be represented by a software bot. It is useful to think about how contestable a market with network effects...

Yesterday Instagram announced that it has 200 million users for stories, which exceeds Snapchat’s 160 million users from their S-1 filing. Never mind that nobody outside these companies knows what those user definitions really mean or how to compare them. This has nonetheless rekindled a debate about copying that periodically arises in the tech industry. For a previous instance, take the outrage over Rocket Internet’s copying of US businesses for Europe and also Asia. If you want to go much f...

I have for some time pointed out the negative impact on innovation of the appstore duopoly. Things are getting worse though. With the latest releases of iOS and Android the ability of third party developers to create great experiences are being further curtailed in the name of privacy and battery life. That might be OK if Apple and Google didn’t have their own apps that compete for usage such as maps or transportation, but they do. Apple and Google are using the same playbook that Microsoft a...

I was in Berlin a couple of weeks ago and there appear to be at least half a dozen bicycle and scooter networks in the city. This makes for a terrible experience because you have to sort of guess which network you might want to use and if that one doesn’t have equipment nearby try another one. It also means that usage of equipment on any one network is far below what it could be resulting in lots of bikes and scooters sitting around on sidewalks. What should be done instead? Cities should get...

The European Union launched an Antitrust Complaint against Google over Android. It is a shame that we keep coming back to using antitrust legislation to try to deal with issues of concentration and market power in information industries. We need alternative regulatory tools that are more in line with how computation works and why the properties of information tend to lead to concentration. We want networks and network effects to exist because of their positive externalities. Imagine as a coun...

If you have looked for your car recently in a big parking lot and had trouble finding it you can be forgiven. All modern cars look alike. In fact, if you photoshop the grille of one maker onto the car of another and it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference as this work by Jalopnik demonstrates Yup. That’s a Kia with a BMW grille. So why do I bring this up? Because yesterday Twitter announced that it was replacing the star icon with a heart for favoriting. This too seems to me driven by a...

Watching Tesla’s video of a door-to-door self driving car offers an amazing glimpse into an autonomous and robotic future But there was also a disturbing footnote to the announcement: you are not allowed to let your self-driving Tesla operate as part of Uber or Lyft, only as part of some forthcoming Tesla network. Now you might ask, is such a restriction legal? Haven’t I, as the purchaser, paid for the car? And normally, once I have paid for a car, doesn’t the manufacturer have no further say...

Last July I had predicted that Google would go all in by bundling Google+ aggressively with search and that is exactly what was just announced yesterday with Search, plus Your World. The “plus Your World” part right now refers “your world on Google” as only Google+ profiles, posts and shared images are included and not content from Twitter, Facebook or others. John Batelle’s capture this well in his aptly titled “Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World.” Also worth reading are Dann...

In the last few days Apple suspended the enterprise certificates for first Facebook and then Google, rendering internal iOS apps instantly useless. Apple did so in response to revelations that both companies had used the enterprise certificates to distribute VPN apps to teenagers in order to better understand phone usage. This is apparently in violation of the enterprise certificate license. Some people have cheered Apple’s actions as not only justified but appropriate sanctions on Facebook a...

Only a short post today as I was spending most of the morning on the phone with some PR folks in Germany talking about the German National Computer Science Competition (page in German). I participated in and was one of five national winners in one of the early years this competition was held. They called to find out what I thought of it all these years later (this year marks the 30th anniversary of the competition overall). I told them that I had very fond memories and was glad to see this tr...