Benedict Evans tweeted out this chart yesterday:
We sometimes think of the shift to mobile as finished, or almost finished. It isn’t. pic.twitter.com/l5gaiMlaoU
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) March 12, 2016
The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, Whatsapp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class mobile apps and move their userbases from web to mobile. But, if you stare at the top 200 non-game mobile apps in the US (and most of the western hemisphere) you will see that the list doesn’t look that different than the top 200 websites. The mobile revolution from 2007 to 2015 in the west was more about how we accessed the internet than what apps we used, with some notable and important exceptions.
But the next 2.5bn people to adopt smartphones may turn out to be a different story. They will mostly live outside the developed and wealthy parts of the world and they will look to their smartphones to deliver essential services that they have not been receiving at all – from the web or from the offline world. I am thinking about financial services, healthcare services, educational services, transportation services, and the like. Stuff that matters a bit more than seeing where you friends had a fun time last night or what it looks like when you faceswap with your sister.
Benedict is right. We aren’t done with the mobile revolution. But we are mostly done with it in the developed world. So where do we go to find the big mobile opportunities of this second revolution? Do we go to asia where they are having a very different looking mobile revolution? Do we go to latin america, the middle east, africa, eastern europe, and southeast asia? Or do we think that entrepreneurs in the US and other parts of the developed world will build and deliver these important new services to the developing world? I am not so clear on that. We are seeing a bit of all of this right now. I would like to believe that entrepreneurs all over the world now have the capabilities (both technical and financial) to build game changing and disruptive new services and launch them in their countries and regions of the world.
However, there are still many roadblocks for entrepreneurs in these emerging economies. It is not lost on me that Mpesa was launched by and is owned by the dominant local carrier in Kenya. It is not lost on me that Russian lawmakers are proposing a seven year jail sentence for bitcoin use. It is not lost on me that war and strife in the middle east will make building companies there harder.
But the thing that is particularly exciting about new services in the developing world is that they may come with fundamentally new business models. And, it turns out, new business models are even more disruptive than new technologies. Microsoft can copy Netscape. But copying the Linux business model is harder. Chase can copy Venmo’s app, but copying Venmo’s business model is harder.
So I am excited to watch this second mobile revolution unfold. It may be an opportunity for US-based VCs like me. But more likely it will be an opportunity for VCs and early stage investors who have had the courage and foresight to set up shop in these emerging locations. The investors who had the courage and foresight to set up shop in China in the late 90s and early 00s have been rewarded fabulously for that. If you ask me where the next big whitespace for VC is, I would point to the developing world. It doesn’t come without its risks and roadblocks, but it feels to me that it has enormous potential.
