PART 1: THE INTERNET IS HAVING A KODAK MOMENT

Netscape’s popularity was synonymous with the internet itself – which is to say, it exploded virtually overnight. In 1995, Netscape went public, reaching a then-unprecedented valuation of $2.9 Billion on the first day of its IPO.

Google owns all the starting points. Just flipped open the laptop? Open Chrome. Need to find something? Google Search. Time to check your email? Gmail. Using a non-Apple smartphone? Android. Need to go somewhere? Google Maps / Waze. Looking for a video? Youtube. Need to work on something? Google Docs/Drive. And the list goes on.

And in general, the average user is now starting to actually care about things like privacy, data custody, and data ownership, which poses a real political threat to Big Tech.

But while in many ways more limited, the early web also provided a far more level playing field to its early settlers. As there were no “cities” yet per se, the most valuable virtual real estate hadn’t yet accreted to a small cabal of gatekeepers.

Kodak, after having literally invented the digital camera, failed to recognize that digital was quickly becoming the inevitable future of photography.

Just as our early ancestors had no understanding of how fire would fundamentally alter human evolution – it was just a very convenient tool – the inventors of key technologies which later became the plumbing of the internet had no idea what they were truly creating.

The social web brought with it a number of real advantages. Building an audience was 10X faster. And reaching a social audience (in addition to email) gave brands an entirely new way to communicate at scale... But at the end of the day, the land still belonged to the King.

And finally, adding the personalized Newsfeed was the killer app that FB needed to truly become endemic. This transformed the platform into the perfect dopamine storm; users logged in and experienced the optimal confluence of a social inbox + voyeurism + curated news + validation

Anyone with a domain name & and an email list had the same chance as anyone else of becoming the go-to start page for their niche.