It wasn't at all obvious that Google could do better than the big four of the day. There were at least thirty upstarts that had good results in some way or other. My money wouldn't have been on google.
With paypal it seemed crazy that sellers would hand over control of their bank accounts to this unqualified, unregulated company. Given paypal's history of account freezes, it still does.
Video sharing sucked in 2004, damn right. Microsoft and Real and Aol and Apple were pouring big money into making it work. Could we've guessed that someone was going to make a lot of money in internet video? Sure. Could we have predicted that it would be youtube? Much tougher. Dropbox was the same; there were hundreds of other products making much the same claims about how they could synchronize your files easily. Likewise skype; we'd had netmeeting for years (even today, polycom are still in business selling software that works less well than skype for hundreds of thousands).
Can you predict that a given service could be done much better? Maybe. But picking which startup is going to win based on that is a whole lot harder.
I agree with almost everything you said, but being leery of a startup because it has stiff competition or regulatory hurdles is not the same as reacting with a "WTF?" to the basic idea like PG did when Facebook was new. It was an odd example for him to use.
With paypal it seemed crazy that sellers would hand over control of their bank accounts to this unqualified, unregulated company. Given paypal's history of account freezes, it still does.
Video sharing sucked in 2004, damn right. Microsoft and Real and Aol and Apple were pouring big money into making it work. Could we've guessed that someone was going to make a lot of money in internet video? Sure. Could we have predicted that it would be youtube? Much tougher. Dropbox was the same; there were hundreds of other products making much the same claims about how they could synchronize your files easily. Likewise skype; we'd had netmeeting for years (even today, polycom are still in business selling software that works less well than skype for hundreds of thousands).
Can you predict that a given service could be done much better? Maybe. But picking which startup is going to win based on that is a whole lot harder.