PART 1: THE INTERNET IS HAVING A KODAK MOMENT

Fast forward to today, and it’s become increasingly clear that the crypto ecosystem – specifically, its blockchain infrastructure – will fundamentally change the way we use, build and benefit from the internet.

Also, much like a small homestead on a hundred acres, websites were closed ecosystems and isolated. There were no social networks or marketplace platforms to tap as a firehose channel for building an audience, and there was no real mechanism for ‘going viral’.

You had to grow your traffic the old fashioned way – by asking your digital neighbors for ... See more

But while in many ways more limited, the early web also provided a far more level playing field to its early settlers. As there were no “cities” yet per se, the most valuable virtual real estate hadn’t yet accreted to a small cabal of gatekeepers.

Anyone with a domain name & and an email list had the same chance as anyone else of becoming the go-to start page for their niche.

Amazon owns the shopper. From its start here status for buying anything online to its world-class fulfillment & logistics infrastructure, the Amazon ecommerce experience is unmatched – nothing else even comes close.

They simply couldn’t imagine a world where people would choose digital over film; they failed to see what digital would actually become, and just how quickly its customers would adopt it.

And finally, adding the personalized Newsfeed was the killer app that FB needed to truly become endemic. This transformed the platform into the perfect dopamine storm; users logged in and experienced the optimal confluence of a social inbox + voyeurism + curated news + validation

Most people just weren’t ready to live online. Perhaps most importantly, using the internet was still a novel, infrequent activity. Unlike today, where most of us now spend several hours online daily – back then, it was something you’d “turn on” a few times a week at most.

And as such, both Google & Facebook have become the “IQ test” for customer acquisition – you’d have to be insane not to use them.