Charlie Songhurst

And suddenly topics look very, very different.

And there's a danger of defaulting to this because the US is sort of the world hegemon to defaulting to that mindset.

And that's not always the best, most predictive view.

Of course, after we finish this, I'll think of tons, but I'm sort of failing to think of anything in the moment.

I think there's one I would pick.

It would be, I think one of the things that's sort of fascinating in sort of the history of tech is how much startups are temporal inevitabilities.

So there's a phrase someone said to me, what's the difference between a heretic and a prophet in tech?

The heretic gets burnt at the stake.

You know, the prophet becomes famous about two years later.

And you sometimes wonder how much timing matters.

Was a site like Pinterest always going to exist within a year that you could download a page of images on the internet in under 100 milliseconds?

Was that the sort of temporal inevitability of a product like that?

And is it the same for most products?

Was GPS and mobile phone, did that make an uber-like thing inevitable in around 2009, 2010?

One of the great unknowns is the temporal one.

And then I think the other sort of great unknown is

How much of value is actually created for the top layers of the stack by the bottom layers that don't capture it?

So are we all just the beneficiaries?

Is angel investing purely the beneficiary of the emergence of AWS and Azure?

Because I can tell a story whereby angel investing just didn't exist because it was negative ROIC because you had spent so much on some microsystem servers and sort of physical equipment that you just had poor IRR across the whole industry.