Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast.

Today I'm with Benedict Evans and Bologi Shrnavasen.

Guys, let's talk about the, there's sort of this recurring idea that in the press, for example,

that everyone in Silicon Valley is doing, spending time on trivial things, photo sharing and, you know,

funny little apps and not working on serious things.

So Balji, what do you think about this?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I don't think that's the case.

I think to some extent there's a catch-22 where if you certainly there are people who are working

on social games that are working on you know social networking things like that and that I would argue

that some of those things are going to be more important down the line for example gaming led to

3D graphics and it's leading to Oculus social networking has led led to other services, for example, like Lyft that are built on top of it that are much less, you know, trivial than poking.

But even taking those and saying they're maybe more important than people think, Twitter started as breakfast status updates and now it's used for revolutions and breaking news.

So even given that those things are actually not as trivial as people think,

the other aspect, the other side of the coin is, while those things are easy to start,

there are applications in genomics and, you know, drones and Bitcoin and 3D printing and things like that

that do run into regulatory challenges.

And so, you know, some of the reason that people see these things that are perceived as fluff that, you know, get big fast, is that it is non-trivial to build a business in the other area.

So there's, I think, the regulatory barriers there as well.

I would argue that a lot of this is also the media, just sort of what's, you know, it's much, is a function of the way media covers Silicon Valley.

So it's, you know, if you look at, for example, so we as our firm, we were investors in Instagram,

we were also investors in Nysera.

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