Disruption is a word often used in the technology industry, and it might seem that the path from disruptive technology to market dominance is a fairly simple one.

And yet the nature of disruption and how different innovators and companies harnessed disruptive technology hardly goes in a straight line.

In this episode from September 2018, Benedict Evans and Stephen Sinofsky use the example of Tesla and electric vehicles to dig

into the nuances of what disruption looks like in practice, in the tech industry and beyond.

Hi and welcome to the A16Z Podcast.

In another of our hallway conversation episodes,

Benedict Evans and Stephen Sinofsky 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 Stephen Sinofsky.

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 you know we're in an interesting time like certainly economically like if you look at the you know the main US car companies you know Ford, 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 we use disruption a lot in Silicon Valley

and in technology in particular. And what's interesting about the looking at Tesla is you know it it may or may not

really be disruption in the way that the book is written which is sort of oh God, there's a whole new thing, and then the old

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