Benedict Evans

“Evans ends with William Goldman's line: 'No one knows anything.' The internet era produced AOL, Yahoo, and Pointcast before it produced Google.”

“He spent 25 years as one of the sharpest analysts in tech... His 2013 'Mobile Is Eating the World' became required reading for the smartphone wave while it was still forming.”

“ChatGPT has over 900 million weekly active users, but only 5% of them are paying... For at least 80% of users, total usage across all of 2025 was under 1,000 prompts. That is fewer than 3 per day.”

“We'll do ads, we'll do e-commerce, we'll do shopping carts, we'll do payments, we'll do a browser, we'll do a social video app, you know, everything. Ask ChatGPT for 15 ideas for what we could do to build value on top of infrastructure, and then we'll do all of them. It's almost literally what it looked like.”

“Microsoft Meta and Google are all on in line to spend over 50% of revenue on CapEx... $700 billion is the guidance from the big four companies this year.”

“All the questions that matter for Netflix have become media industry questions. This is obviously the great tension point about Tesla. It's a car company. It was a technology company.”

“What if $15 a month gets you all the music that there is? Which is something that was just completely impossible.”

“Google and Meta and Amazon don't really know what that product is... they don't know why. And with an LLM, like in principle, you would kind of know what those things are and why people buy them... which is of course why you see the ad numbers and the conversion rates shooting up in every quarter from Google and Facebook.”

“You can say, look at my Instagram and suggest a winter coat I should buy that will change my look, but not too much. And again, like three years ago, that would have been total science fiction. And now you think, yeah, you could probably build something like that.”

“Go and ask Martin Casado what he thinks. I don't know. I mean, he doesn't know either. He probably has a better way of saying he doesn't know than I do.”

“I remember Chris Dixon saying like 10-15 years ago that APIs is a new BD and software companies could just open up your APIs... what's old is new, you don't need an API anymore, you just have an MCP server.”

“Ben Affleck probably knows a lot more about this than I do. He built a company and sold it for like $100 million.”

“My old boss, Mark Andreessen, was working on Netscape, there were like double-digit millions of PCs on the entire planet. So like, no, you couldn't have 900 million weekly active users, because there weren't 900 million PCs.”

“Participants: Benedict Evans, Erik Torenberg”

“Anthropic's gone from whatever it was, $9 billion run rate at the end of last year to $47 billion run rate now. But that's all software, isn't it?”

“Agentic coding went from being kind of useful to really changing everything.”

“if you look at survey data on which LLMs people use, even before the Llama thing, Meta was up there between ChatGPT and Gemini.”

“A company called Frame.io, video editing, video collaboration. And there's nothing new there that you couldn't have done at least five years earlier... The delay was somebody realizing, oh, we could — that problem exists inside that industry.”

“Spotify is not an online music store. It's something else... you have to get past 'we do the old stuff, but more.' And you have to get to what do you do that's different because of this.”

“Steven Sinofsky at A16Z, who used to run Windows, would always say, incumbents always try and make the new thing a feature. And sometimes they're right. Sometimes it's a feature.”

“My most controversial opinion is that I think that AI is as big a deal as the internet or mobile, and only as big a deal as the internet or mobile... we're in 1997. It's very exciting. Most stuff kind of doesn't work yet.”