Scott Galloway, professor of Marketing and Brand Strategy at NYU Stern, recently delivered a presentation on the Gang of Four: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These dominant companies are also often referred to as the “Four Horsemen.”
The video is about 16 minutes long and I would highly recommend that you give it a watch.
It’ll be like drinking from a firehose, but there are so many fascinating takeaways. You’ll also quickly discover how far reaching the societal impacts of these companies have been and will likely be in the future.
If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjg0kGQFBY?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Earlier this week I wrote a post called: The pull from services to products. And in it I made mention of the fact that part of what’s driving this pull towards products is that the marginal cost of servicing additional users or customers is almost nothing in a world of internet services and products.
Well the reality is that this phenomenon is driving a hell of a lot more. It could – and probably will – fundamentally change almost all aspects of the economy.
I know that sounds like a pretty audacious statement, but if you watch the following 10 minute talk by Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures) you might start to feel the same way. He outlines 5 changes being driven by the fact that in the digital world, marginal cost = 0. The impacts go well beyond tech, capturing sectors such as transportation and industrial real estate.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVEtTzlqsoE?rel=0]
If you can’t see the video, click here.
Last year when I started working on Dirt—which was really my first startup—I had a number of people say things to me like: “Wow, that’s quite a change, going from real estate into tech.” But that’s not the way I saw and see it.
I don’t think you can silo industries like that anymore. Technology is touching everything. Some would even go so far as to say that every company in the world is, or will be, a software and technology company.
The way I looked at it was that I was starting a technology-enabled real estate company. I was hoping to leverage the internet to improve the way things are done in an existing industry. Of course, by improve I really mean disrupt—which is arguably the biggest buzzword in the tech community today:
"Disruption is not so much a trend as an especially lucrative world philosophy favored by technophilic entrepreneurs. It’s the only path towards progress. If you’re not disrupting something you might as well go collect kindling and roast raccoon meat in the hills of Cupertino."