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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

Mobile did not go to startups. It remained with the incumbents from pre-mobile (Google, Meta, Apple). It appears only the Internet was a truly game changing event if you are thinking of brand new gigantic companies go from startup phase to trillion dollars.

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Mobile _phones_ did not go to startups. Making money off mobile -- whether apps that were impossible before, or features which advantaged certain companies who were able to be mobile-early or mobile-first, advantaged startups.

A bit. There was enough space that the incumbents failed to notice a niche here or there. And in particular, Google left a relatively big portion of the ad market open for grabs.

But the incumbents succeeded in capturing most of the money involved with mobile. And only became more powerful after it.

Yeah, there were startups from the mobile era, they just got bought.

I think the social media startups like instagram are a good example of the startups from the mobile era.

Only Apple had the phone, Google's phone is mostly for pushing innovation (not sales) and Meta doesn't have a phone or OS. In the final analysis, most of the value went to these guys not the hundreds/thousands of startups that got started on mobile. Whatever these startups did, these guys copied or bought and drove most of the value post-acquisition (ex. Insta/Meta). Uber is probably the biggest and it only just crossed $150B recently.

What about Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and the many other companies that (arguably) were only possible because of smart phones?

Three different people are telling you that the majority of value accrued to the ones listed. Insta and Lyft are both under $10B while the other three got into trillions of dollars post mobile.

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