Hi everyone, welcome to the A6CCNC podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm here today with Michael and we are talking to Bill Janeway.

Bill is a senior advisor at Warburg-Pinkus where he had headed up its high-tech investment efforts starting in the late 80s.

So he was actually one of the early venture capitalists. And he is also a visiting lecturer today in economics at Cambridge where he also received his doctorate in economics. So the best way to probably describe him is as a theorist practitioner

of financial economics. A couple years ago, Bill wrote the definitive and award-winning book

on doing capitalism in the innovation economy. And he has a really unique perspective

having tracked the history and evolution

of venture capital. So we thought it'd be great to have him on the A6NZ podcast to share his

perspective on the industry today. Welcome, Bill. Thank you very much. So we want to tap into your

brain if we can today and talk to you about what's top of mind. And I know you've

been, you write a lot about innovation, you talk about it. You've had some tweet storm battles with our

own Mark Andreessen around the subject of unicorns and how to think about it. So maybe we can jump in there.

Well, sure, we can start there. The, uh, my Tweetstorm conversations with Mark

have actually begun with what I think was a misunderstanding, but I think clarifying this particular

issue helps understand where the unicorns come from, though not necessarily where they're going.

So my thesis is that, like electricity in the 1920s, from the point of view of the user, not the

engineer, not the guys behind the scenes or under the table. But from the point of view of the user,

IT is in the process of disappearing. Now, that comes in the context of open source software, web services

from the cloud, which means that the cost in terms of time and money of launching a new service

has declined asymptotically to zero.

Not building it out into a full business, but launching it.

Back in the 20s, when you could plug into the wall, into a standard socket,

instead of worrying about cycles and impedance, all of a sudden you had an explosion in applications.

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