Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

Given the endless time we all spend with our noses and our phones, it may not be too surprising

to hear that the smartphone has taken over the tech world. But the smartphone's dominance is

so complete, says A16Z's Benedict Evans, that it's useful to think of it as the Sun, that object around which

everything else in the technology planetary system revolves. And as with our own solar system,

Benedict's mobile planetary model includes lesser bodies that circle around the Sun feeding

off its energy and pull.

You know, you might see a smart meter is Pluto, you know, it's like it's not very exciting.

It hasn't got, doesn't look like it's got very much to do with the mobile industry, but actually it's using smartphone components.

Putting the smartphone at the center of things also elevates the mobile supply chain above

the other big component stream in tech,

the one serving the PC industry. So instead of the guts of PCs being mixed and matched to create

new kinds of tech gadgets, it's all the processors, radios, and other bits inside smartphones

that are the engine of current and future waves of technology.

So as though someone took a shipping container of Lego and dumped it on the floor.

You have all these bits and we're just picking up, working out what we can do with them.

And so that's what's behind drones and wearables and connected TVs and connected cars and internet of things and all of these other things.

And if mobile is the sun, the companies and geographies that best harness that energy are

dominant.

Now it's about Apple and Google and it's about Arm and Qualcomm and MediaTech, and it's about

the San Francisco Bay Area and China.

And so all of those kinds of, all of the places that you'd go

...