A Kardashian Moment, But For Tech
Nerds are getting exponentially hotter
I understand why venture investors almost exclusively bet on exponentials. There’s a sort of “antigravity” field that happens when you’re in an exponential. It’s what lead Twitter to be so successful despite it being “A clown car that drove into a goldmine”
The goldmine wasn’t social; it was simply the exponential amount of people coming into social. And at any given time, there’s an exponential forming…somewhere.
Right now, there’s a few really massive exponentials colliding in tech.
Content vacuum opening of content space due to hyper consumption (TikTok, Shorts, etc)
Lowered cost due to acceleration of production tooling not yet realized (Video, Vibe coding, etc)
Bonus: A shifting from “What was not cool” (programming) to “What is cool”
What you’re witnessing now is the equivalent of reality TV (e.g “Keeping up with the Kardashian’s”) → Streaming and the content void of early 2010’s. It didn’t really matter what the content was, so long as there was…a lot more of it that could be consumed on the mediums
TV → Streaming → Shorts
Each time you switch consumption models, you increase content consumption bandwidth. I can watch 10x more streaming (on demand) than TV, and I can consume 10x as many shorts because it’s consumable everywhere.
Tech is, sorta, waking up to this. But I still think it’s early days. And I think the difference is, this time, tech is actually going to capitalize on this media section. YC see’s it, a16z see’s it, founders on X see it
That’s the arb. Nerds in the limelight (???), instead of nerds on the cinema (The Social Network)
Examples: Cluely, TBPN, Replit on JRE, etc