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Welcome to the A16Z podcast.

I'm Zalbillamoria, and I'm joined by Preeti Kasseretti and Benedict Evans, who is just back from CES, and I thought this might be a good week to discuss the Internet of Things, otherwise known as IoT. So, Benedict, what do you think the state of the world is in terms of Internet of Things? Well, it's kind of at an interesting transition point, I think, because you saw dozens, if not hundreds of people putting together packages of devices of various kinds that you can put in your home.

It's like you could probably buy a thousand smart door knobs and a thousand window sensors.

And it's kind of at the point now where it's not really a technology question

or even really necessarily a use case question.

It's more kind of how do you get this to market?

How do you explain to consumers why it might work? Which ones will they buy? How much should they talk to each other? Should you just buy a burglar alarm set? And the burgle alarm, you'll put the burglal alarm set up. And then you might or might not do a thermostat and you might not do a home audio system. Or should they be kind of on some sort of standard that all talks to each other?

And what are the overlaps between the things that should and shouldn't talk to each other?

It's all about kind of route to market and kind of market positioning and, you know,

what do you actually put on a shelf in Home Depot?

Yep.

Because the technology is all that.

Yeah, it feels like, you know, if we're talking about interoperability and standards, but it really does feel like there's hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers that are building for IoT.

But do we really have killer use cases yet and killer applications?

That's a really good question.

I mean, you mentioned that you think there's a lot of use cases, but what are the transformational use cases?

Other than locks and

potentially ovens, I don't see turning on a light being that transformational. The way that I

tend to look at this is that, you know, our grandparents could have told you how many electric

motors they aren't. You know, there was one in the car and one in the refrigerator and one in the

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