Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. In another of our hallway conversation episodes,

Benedict Evans and Steven Sinovsky talk about Tesla and more broadly the nature of disruption

overall. How disruptive is Tesla really? What exactly are they disrupting from the dashboard to

carmakers to vendors to energy source to autonomy overall? And how much does each innovation

matter? Looking back at other

examples historically, what kind of disruption matters most for market dominance? Good morning.

I'm Steven Sinovsky. I'm Benedict Evans. What we thought we would talk about today is a little bit

about the nature of disruption, and in particular about Tesla and the rise of electric vehicles and

sort of how disruptive is Tesla? We're in an interesting time, like certainly economically.

Like if you look at the main U.S. car companies, you know, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, GM, all of them

are worth less than Tesla in market cap individually.

And certainly if you look at the past year, Tesla has been worth twice as much as them at some point.

So crazy, interesting world.

But, you know, we use disruption a lot in Silicon Valley and in technology in particular.

And what's interesting about looking at Tesla is, you know, it may or may not really be

disruption in the way that the book has written, which is sort of, oh my God, there's a whole

new thing, and then the old thing just goes away, and it's all new players.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting to look at how people think about Tesla here.

Because on the one hand, you have the narrative, oh my God, they're doing this stuff that the car companies can't do.

On the other, you have the narrative, oh my God, they're making the cars in a tent and bits fall off when you drive down the highway.

Ha, ha, ha, ha. It'll never work. And this reminded me a lot of sort of hearing similar

conversations around, for example, the iPhone. This is a terrible phone, we'll add touch really

...