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a16z2023 Big Ideas in Technology (Part 1)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
a16z Partners Share Six Big Technology Ideas for 2023
- Connie Chan argues social commerce and live video shopping will become obvious in 2023, as Western platforms lag Asian ones because of organizational inertia, ad revenue tradeoffs, and a mobile-first rather than mobile-only user base.
- Anne Lee Skates describes how online-first life is replacing physical third spaces, and sees opportunity in digital tools that deepen relationships and also prompt in-person interaction.
- Jack Soslow and Doug McCracken focus on games, with Soslow expecting increasingly human-like bots and foundation models to transform game creation, and McCracken expecting brands to chase self-expression through skins and interoperable avatars.
- Sarah Wang and Sumeet Singh say generative AI will move into enterprise workflows and fintech, starting in fault-tolerant, human-in-the-loop uses where owning the workflow and distribution creates differentiation.
- Across the conversations, host Steph Smith repeatedly highlights themes of physical-to-digital transfer, copying versus rethinking behaviors natively, and fault tolerance as a guide to where AI applies first.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasWestern shopping is still search-based, not discovery-based
Connie Chan says friction between inspiration and checkout, plus a lack of live and entertaining video tools, keeps Western platforms behind China, Shein, and Temu in pushing recommendation-driven shopping.
Eastern ideas reach the West with a lag, for organizational and mobile reasons
Chan notes a lag of at least a year and generally three to five years, caused by top-down organizational changes, near-term ad revenue hits, and the US being mobile-first rather than mobile-only.
Digital third spaces unlock global niche communities and new kinds of presence
Anne Lee Skates says online lets people find specialized peers among billions, and digital presence lets you switch environments instantly, as seen in Whatnot and RPGs.
Game bots should be designed for, not just banned
Jack Soslow distinguishes designer-made bots that improve a game from player-made hacks, and suggests building game structure around bots and offering human-only servers.
Brands will go digital as players pay for self-expression
Doug McCracken cites Gen Z and Gen Alpha attitudes and Fortnite earning over $2 billion, with more than half from cosmetics, and expects interoperability to grow over time.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesShopping is all about giving consumers confidence that this is the thing that's gonna change their life and make their lives better, right?
— Connie Chan
The West shopping is still search-based, and we are not focused on pushing kind of this discovery-based, full 100% recommendation engine shopping experience to the end user.
— Connie Chan
The Turing test, as you say, is like a flawed metric, and the reason for this is in part because it is too low of a bar. It is a binary bar, so it's either intelligent or not intelligent, and it tests for deception, not real understanding.
— Jack Soslow
I think games is coming for a new renaissance. There's gonna be just tons and tons of games that are made, but the real skill is in understanding what a good game looks like.
— Jack Soslow
If your company doesn't have an AI strategy, it should really be thinking about one yesterday.
— Sarah Wang
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
