Once AI is embedded in an industry like media or law, the important open questions stop being San Francisco technology questions and become industry-specific questions that only people from that industry can really answer — exactly as happened with Netflix, where all the meaningful decisions became Los Angeles/TV questions rather than tech questions.
Evans compares AI's rollout to his earlier 'Netflix isn't a tech company' argument: once a technology is embedded in an industry, the consequential questions become industry-specific (what shows, what legal work, what analysis) rather than technical ones that Silicon Valley can answer. ✦ AI generated
Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast · 2026-06-08 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 26:01
“what are some of the next questions that you're most focused on or that you know we should be paying most attention to”
if you looked at Netflix, this whole thing is enabled by stuff the tech industry is built. But all the questions for Netflix are are TV LA questions like what shows, how many shows, what kind of shows, what should you pay the talent... These are all Los Angeles questions. These are not San Francisco questions.
verbatim transcript · starts at 26:01
26:01king. And I also wrote something that said Netflix isn't a tech company. And the point I was kind of getting at is that if you looked at Netflix, this whole thing is enabled by stuff the tech industry is built. But all the questions for Netflix are are TV LA questions like what shows, how many shows, what kind of shows, what should you pay the talent, should you aim for awards, should you do
26:19movies, should you buy sports, what kind of sports? These are all Los Angeles questions. These are not San Francisco questions. Like no one in San Francisco even knows what the right questions are. They're media industry questions. And this was kind of my point that that that that all the questions that matter to Netflix have become media industry questions. You this is obviously the great tension point about Tesla. Is it a
26:37car company? was it was technology company. Um, and so what I'm kind of getting at is is that, you know, what does this stuff mean for law is kind of a question for lawyers as much as it is or people who understand a lot about law firms and how they actually work and what they're actually doing and what the clients actually buying from them. Same thing for like what does generative video mean
27:03for Hollywood? Like, you know, Ben Affleck probably knows a lot more about this than I do. he built a company and sold it for like 100 billion hundred million dollars. So obviously he does but like you know that so that's kind of a second question which is the questions move outside of AI and they become sort of half AI questions half something else kind of questions. Um and then the third
27:21level which is I think and I probably should have said this earlier what the way that all of this is sort of fundamentally different from previous platform shifts is that with you know 3G or the iPhone or the web or whatever it was you didn't know what was going to happen next but you knew the physical limits like you know 1995 you knew that Telos weren't going to give everybody in
27:39the world broadband next week and you knew that everyone in the world wasn't going to go out and buy a PC cuz a PC cost like $3,000. So, you kind of knew the basic physical limits of what what could and couldn't happen. And with generative AI, obviously, we don't like we might like like look at our phones when we get off this recording and there's a push notification that says
27:58that like Open AI's new model is out and it's like 2% of the price because they worked something out. I mean, I don't think it's very likely at this, but like we don't know those kinds of questions. So, how much bigger will the models get? How much better? How much faster? How much cheaper? how much you know pick up you know in what ways will the characters as models change we don't