Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I am Michael Copeland, and we have in the room our man in Barcelona, Benedict Evans, who is back now from Mobile World Congress.

Benedict, welcome back.

Hello.

All right, let's talk about Mobile World Congress. It is the largest gathering of what these days?

It's something like 90 to 100,000 attendees and it is the annual

global trade fair for the mobile telecoms industry. So all the people who sell stuff to telcos,

which is about a $1.2 trillion industry. So over double the size of the entire advertising industry in the entire

advertising industry for context and something like 10 times the size of the online advertising

industry. So it's a big industry and it's a big trade fair and it's everything from billing

software to base stations to handsets to camera sensors to every single bit of that value chain.

There's always been hand-wringing over mobile world Congress versus, you know, CES and

other things. And what's common in both of those massive gatherings is that Apple doesn't show up,

or at least Apple doesn't show up officially. So we hear about all the gadgets that come out of there. It's a sort of Android world

really is what it's come to, or it used to be the Nokia world. But put that in context. Like,

what does Mobile World Congress wrap its arms around these days? And what does it start to look

like? Well, it's an interesting shift. I mean, I first went in 2001 as a baby analyst, and it was probably a tenth of the size.

And it was in Cannes, which was kind of a cold, rainy French provincial town.

Did your parents have to take you?

Did they chaperone you?

No, although there was an urban legend about somebody whose assistant booked him a flight to Cain in the north of France, which is, if you don't know, if you

know the spelling, it looks kind of similar.

Great.

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