Hello, welcome to the A16Z podcast, or A16Z, if we want to localize this.

I'm Benedict Evans. I'm here today talking with Steven Sinovsky, one of my new colleagues at Andrews and Horowitz.

Steven, hello.

Hi there, how's it going?

Pretty good. So you spent a long time working on productivity and working out ways that people were going to work and ways that would change and how that could be taken forward over time.

And you wrote a really interesting blog post a day or two ago looking at how devices in cloud and SaaS kind of bring a sort of generational change into how those

kind of tools work. Can you talk a bit about your blog post and how you think about that?

Sure. Well, you know, for me, it really just, it all starts back when I started in computing.

You know, when I started in computing, I was, you know, helping to computerize. That was the word we used

back then. My father's own own business. And I've seen a lot of productivity stuff over,

over the years. My first actual paying job was a summer of a very large defense contractor. It

was the 80s, the Cold War defense contractor jobs, what we all went and did

in the computer world. And, you know, I showed up that first day of work, and, you know, they used

this email system that we don't think of as email, but it was called profs. And it was IBM mainframe

based email. So those of you that dates you, and you knew about Oliver North and the whole Iran-Contra

scandal, that was how they communicated was with this prof's email.

And the way that managers used email was they would get mail, but they would have somebody

and an assistant printed out, and then they would dictate the reply, and then they would

type the reply in and send it.

And so it wasn't visible at all that it was happening electronically to management.

And next to every administrative person's desk was a selectric typewriter,

and the telex was the way that you quickly transmitted information.

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