NFX’s James Currier: “The end of the social media ice age”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson, managing partner at venture capital firm NFX, to talk about the golden age of social media (3:00), the early social network he founded (5:10), the ice age (7:20), how social media is like railroads (9:10), the opportunity for social work apps (11:50), the chilling Facebook effect (13:00), the early days of Houseparty (16:), its moment arriving five years later (20:00), the buzzy Clubhouse app (21:00), how the idea of identity has changed (22:40), his involvement in the founding of Bebo (25:15), why being first isn't necessarily best (27:50), the paucity of founders (32:10), and why we shouldn’t underestimate Facebook (32:20).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	By the time Facebook launched, we already had 30 million users
0:09.0	and we were like, why would we go back to college
0:12.0	and go to a smaller market?
0:14.0	Because we're already growing and it's, you know,
0:16.0	it's growing 60,000 people a day.
0:18.0	Why don't we just keep going?
0:20.0	That was the wrong choice.
0:28.0	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:35.1	I am your host, Danny Fson, tech correspondent for The Sunday
0:38.5	Times, coming to you live from my garage or garage, if you are so inclined, which I have,
0:46.4	we have kind of turned into our new home office because at this rate, I guess I'm not, I'm just
0:53.0	going to guess, we're going to go back into the office till
0:55.6	2021. And this week, to that point, we are talking about eras, historical epochs, if you will,
1:05.6	and how we may just be about to come out of one. So, James Courier has been knee-deep in social media
1:14.1	since the late 90s, which makes him something of a gray beard out here in the social media
1:20.7	world. So he started one of the first social networks, sold it, funded another one, a little
1:26.3	company called House Party, which suddenly is
1:29.0	one of the world's most popular apps. And anyhow, he wrote a really interesting blog post some
1:34.5	days back, which is why I wanted to have him on, so we could talk about it. And the thesis is this,
1:39.3	that in the last seven or eight years, has been what he called a social media ice age. There's been very little to
	...

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