The Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2015 Report | Hacker News Reader

The Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2015 Report

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103 pointsandrewljohnson40 comments

Maybe it was just me, but I found the data to be a bit depressing. I'm a GenXer and there are days when the tech industry seems to be run by a generation I have trouble identifying with. The data in this reports suggests I'm not just being paranoid (more millennials in workforce than other named generations).

I was also shocked by the % of people who think they can get a new online gig in < 24 hours. The slides pointed at Upwork and ThumbTack. The first seems to be a renaming of oDesk. It seems to be dominated by workers from outside North America (at least for tech work).

This also raises the larger issue of career for GenXers. I was at a conference recently and spoke to some other people my age. The collective feeling I got was there is no defined career track anymore. Apparently, you just move from one interesting gig to another. While this is something millennials may be totally comfortable with, this particular GenXer is not. I'm also reading a book (interesting and depressing) called "Company of One" that seems to suggest that the overall trend is not restricted to millennials but the economy as a whole.

GenXer here. For me the question is whether the web/Internet industry will age with me.

A lot of industries started out as the domain of young risk-takers, but grew to accept and welcome older workers and managers. Railroads, print publishing, and air travel come to mind.

So the question is whether the Internet industry will follow the same path. I think it will, and I (selfishly) hope it will, because I'm not getting any younger.

I feel like lower "layers" of the computing industry have already made this transition. I don't get the feeling that a person needs to be under 30 to get a job at Intel, Oracle, Cisco, HP, etc. But I still get that feeling about a lot of hosted software companies, even big ones like Google or Facebook.

Job postings and job pages can reinforce/hint at this age bias as well. Since they can't outright discriminate, over time I've gotten a lot better at reading between the lines to see if the company has any room for people over 30.

What hints do you look for?

I've got some good news for you: Because boomers have been retiring, and since millennials have no experience, this is the best time for gen x to look at opportunities in management.

Also there has never been a traditional career track for gen x since the boomers always dominated the labor market. And on the flip side gen x seems to work harder while millennials want more personal time.

Something else to keep in mind: Mary Meeker was born in 1959 which to me makes her the very last of the boomers. So the data she looks for will have not just a wall street bias, but an generational one as well.

There's no career track because many companies are unwilling to invest in the training & development of their employees. The expectation is that you hire in the job market from a set of people sitting 'on-the-shelf' with the exact qualifications needed.

Also in larger companies, boomers lived longer than previous generations, and companies had a more difficult time making room for advancement of later generations. Comparatively, boomers were able to 'take the reins' earlier and hold onto the longer than any later or previous generation.

So - develop unique new skills on your own time (or company down time) and move companies when opportunities arise.

Page 98 has the scariest bit of info for our future :

"Since 2000 = Population Grew 2.4x Faster than Jobs...

1948 - 2000 = Jobs Grew 1.7x Faster than Population"

A big portion of that is due to the severe decline in jobs around 2008, but the trend in job numbers seems to be smaller peaks and deeper troughs. Things are not looking great for the average worker.

"Free Agent Nation" came out in 2001. Pink did a great job describing what was happening, and what would continue to happen with the job market (independent working, gig economy, no company loyalty, jobs for life gone, all that):

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2008-06-10/free-agent-na...

I read it back then, but I think it's just as relevant today.

My key takeaways:

1. Global mobile penetration:

5.2 bn active mobile subscribers worldwide, but only 40% have smartphones. Given the apparent ubiquity of smartphones in India and China, this was surprising to me.

This is a fairly significant opportunity. Even if you were to assume mobile penetration ends today, there are still 1.5x as many new smartphone users that will come on to the market over the next decade.

Each additional smartphone user however will have decreasing disposable income because this is what prevented them from acquiring the device sooner in the first place. This means that they'll also be nearly impossible to monetize as customers for a very long time.

The moonshot ISP plays Google and Facebook are making in poorer parts of the world make a lot of sense viewed through this lens. Neither of them have any need to make money of these users immediately. But capturing these users and waiting for their disposable incomes to grow could prove to be a valuable strategy in the long term.

2. Kakaotalk and other messaging platforms

Kakaotalk has 48 mn MAUs, flat year-on-year user growth, and generates $853 mn in revenue / year.

The messaging app with next highest rates of engagement? WhatsApp with 800 mn MAU and 60% year-on-year user growth. That $19 bn USD play Facebook made looks like a bargain.

3. E-Commerce makes up only 9% of retail sales in the United States.

Next time you sneer at yet another e-commerce company launching, remember this metric. The majority of retail transactions can be carried out over the internet. Niche-specific e-commerce platforms simply have to figure out how to sufficiently lower the transaction friction. Some of this ground will be captured by incumbents, but there's a lot of room for startups.

4. Mobile device management = critical in preventing breaches

Enterprise grade MDM turns out be relatively difficult to implement on off-the-shelf consumer mobile devices with any amount of stability or reliability. There's room for someone to step in and offer custom mobile devices for enterprise (good thing we're already working on this and am happy to chat about it if you're curious)

Mod request: Would it make more sense to change the URL and point it to the report itself? Direct URL from KPCB here:

http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/90/Internet_Trends_20...

And the PDF presentation too: http://kpcbweb2.s3.amazonaws.com/files/90/Internet_Trends_20...

Thank you. Very useful for a report this size, that you want to reference back & forth. Slideshare sucks on modest bandwidth, doesn't cache well.

I dunno if it's just me (or perhaps I'm the wrong audience) but I've always found Meeker's presentations to be long on data (lots of graphs and numbers about trends that anyone who's at all interested in the Internet is already well aware of), and short on insight ("So what?").

This one's no different. There are exactly 15 slides (out of 190+) that I found interesting (16, 20, 50/51, 68, 99, 110, 141, 145, 146, 151, 153, 169, 172, and 184), and I find it very strange that there's precisely zero mention of FinTech or Bitcoin/Blockchain.

The utility of this report is in having all of this raw data condensed into a single, authoritative entity. Think of it as detailed notes from your very attentive classmate. You may have absorbed most of the information by osmosis. But having the notes makes it a lot easier to study when finals arrive.

15 interesting slides is a few standard deviations higher than what I normally find interesting in a talk

Something to keep in mind is that she's presenting the data and trends from the point of VC rather than a startup. So you can reverse engineer it as to what will get on an investors screen for this minute (well at least some investors).

But my problem is if you're a startup you tend to think along the lines of solving a problem rather than catching a trend. Another thing is that chasing trends doesn't always produce innovation. For example would Steve Jobs have gone ahead with the iPhone based on a presentation like this from say 2005?

We tend to like data because it gives us the illusion of control, and that's a very wall street way of thinking to make investors feel secure.

> Something to keep in mind is that she's presenting the data and trends from the point of VC rather than a startup.

I first encountered her when she and I were both working (separately) at Morgan Stanley back in 2002, and I thought the exact same thing back then.

Prior submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612574 19hrs ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612438 20hrs ago

HN submissions occur so fast that stories often don't gain traction if submitted during peak times.

One of the problems is that if a story has multiple URLs, this dilutes the traffic. In this case, many people hesitate to link to a PDF, so that scattered the pointers. If multiple people submit the same URL, they get redirected to the original post that they can then vote up, increasing the story's velocity.

This should probably link here instead: http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

The slides immediately brought to mind the "Why PowerPoint Should Be Banned" article from a day or two ago [1].

Looking at them strengthened my tentative view that:

(1) Most slides should contain a short, complete sentence and optionally a picture -- no more.

(2) Each "chunk" of information should get its own slide.

[ADDED:]

(3) When using slides with information-dense graphs, charts, etc., slides with one-sentence summaries and explanations should be interspersed. Meeker's deck has some of that but could use more.

(4) Title slides should be more prominent than in Meeker's deck.

(5) Pictures are nice but shouldn't dominate a slide.

The above are just personal preferences, of course. I do a lot of teaching in which I use slides, and will be experimenting more along these lines.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606345

Presentation slides should be as you describe... but slides that will be consumed by every media org and denizen of the internet need to be denser.

> slides that will be consumed by every media org and denizen of the internet need to be denser.

Dual use could be achieved by interspersing one-sentence explanations and summaries among the information-dense graphs, charts, etc. Meeker's deck has some of that, but could have used more.

That's true if the point of a presentation is to inform. But often the point is to impress or confound since that makes people think what you're saying is more substantial than it actually is.

Many of your guidelines show merit... It occurs to me that context of Meeker's presentation helps. She is a machine gun of rapid-fire observations that feed off of her on-screen data and additional anecdotes.

I can't find a recent video, so here's an example from 2013: http://allthingsd.com/20130529/mary-meekers-2013-internet-tr...

She knocked out 100 slides in ~20 min. This is definitely content that needs multiple reads to take in, but her presentation tends to be the "Cliff's Notes" of the material contained in the deck.

(a) Mobile usage > 50% of total internet usage (b) Mobile advertising ~ 25% of total internet advertising

Gap between (a) and (b) represents a ~$25B+ opportunity (slide 16).

Last few years, mobile ads have been propped up by VC funded companies buying installs. This means the opportunity is primarily for brands.

Why do you think it has been so slow? There seem to be enough mobile platforms to advertise on. Are the ad units too expensive for brand awareness campaigns? Or maybe that's wrong and inventory is limited and the platforms aren't charging enough? Maybe large companies are just slow?

I guess I'm trying to understand what shape this opportunity takes. Is it for new platforms to emerge? Existing platforms to sign more customers or charge more for their ad units? Novel ad exchanges to make it easier for companies to advertise on mobile?

"Are the ad units too expensive for brand awareness campaigns?"

Yes and No. No, in the sense that they're not too expensive relative to tradition desktop display rates, but yes, in the sense that they don't perform to the same same standards as desktop ads. The exception would be things that are native to mobile like app installs, which are also often incentivized through the various platforms they're advertised on. My theory is that mobile ad rates have to come down significantly to match the performance rates of desktop ads to meet the performance across all sectors, but native specific products like apps are keeping the prices higher in part through better performance but also because they're in a sector that's particularly over-funded right now and can afford the higher acquisition costs while cash is flush.

I won't advertise on mobile (phones, not tablets) because the screen size is too small.

I like the part on the trends in China, mainly 150-163. They are the largest part of the InterNet now. They are starting to do innovate projects. In contrast India is still in the copy-America stage, but could become more innovative at some time.

Great as always telling us where we are. Not so great telling us where we're going, where the big financial bets are (she's a VC and should know), what are the significant new technology themes. I was hoping for an opportunity roadmap as seen by KPCB. Just got more ads, more smartphones, more retail. No bitcoin, VR, drones, bioinformatics, energy, or US financials as in years past.

Slide 82 mentions how drone shipments are rising rapidly. Expected to be 3 million this year.

Love how the definitions of Millenials have different age groups - I am either a GenXer or a Millenial. Based on the stats in there, this has a massive effect on my attitudes.

Social Science -_()_-

I also find it weird that someone born 1980 who was an adult when the web was first really exploding is a "millenial" and bucked with people born 2000 who will have grown up with the internet permanently connected.

More like a college student or equivalent age in the late 1990s. Of course these generations are always a bit arbitrary, especially at the boundaries. There's obviously not a big overall generational difference between someone born in, say, 1978 and someone born in 1982. But, on average, I expect there are a lot of differences in attitude, on average, between someone born in 1970 and someone born in 1990.

My key takeway - Newspapers are in trouble... (Slide 16)

Well, they'll go digital or they'll go bankrupt, same as with encyclopedias. It's just shocking how far they still have to go before they hit bottom ad spend.

Yeah. They seem to be getting a lot more than they deserve for historical reasons.

It's crazy how quickly newspapers became just an old relic. I live in the East Bay and the Contra Costa Times started delivering us a free paper for awhile to get us to sign up. I read it one Sunday, but in the end, it just became a thing that sat in my driveway until I threw it in my recycle bin. I called them after a week and asked them to stop the free delivery.

I still get a paper Yellow Pages delivered. That'll come in handy if the internet ever gets deleted.

Eh. Local businesses aren't great about their web presences on average. Especially if you own a house and sometimes need a random local service, the Yellow Pages can actually be handy. I can't say I use mine a lot but I do use it.

Yeah, but you still have all that content in Yell.co.uk so you can get it from there.

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