Netscape

Bundle or unbundle: the only two ways to make money

Greg cites Netscape's Jim Barksdale: there are only two ways to make money, bundling or unbundling. Andrew Parker's classic 'unbundling of Craigslist' post showed the aggregate market cap of the spun-out verticals (Airbnb, StubHub, etc.) far exceeds Craigslist itself.

“It's a famous thing, I think in the '90s, that Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen's partner, co-founder of Netscape, basically said there's only two ways to make money. You can either buy bundle or unbundle. And just, you know, there's, I think, a post by Andrew Parker from— he was at Spark Capital, 2012 maybe. He wrote this post about the unbundling of Craigslist.”

Steal thisFind a big aggregator (Craigslist, Reddit), pick one high-energy vertical, and build a dedicated product for just that community.

Bitcoin is the internet; competing with it is AOL fighting the open web

Svetski argues Bitcoin is a basic, unstoppable network that routes value the way the internet routes data — and the winners will be the value-added services built on top of it. A bank's send/store/receive service needing hundreds of millions in infrastructure can be replicated with a small app for a couple hundred grand.

“And the analogy that I give to people is trying to compete with Bitcoin is like AOL trying to compete with the internet. The companies that succeeded were the ones like Google, Netscape, etc., who built on the internet, which was this really dumb basic packet routing network.”