Yo

1/A story of unbundling in the tech industry: 20 years of consumer Internet evolution 2/One upon a time there was AOL, which was a completely integrated Internet access/information/communication service. 3/Then Yahoo came along and unbundled the information/communication parts like email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes from the access service. 4/One of the things you could do on Yahoo was search, then Google came along and unbundled that. 5/You can search for anything on Google, including people; Facebook came along with a much better way to just search for people. 6/Three things you can do on Facebook are messaging, photo sharing, and status updates; therefore Whatsapp, Instagram, and Twitter. 7/And yes, Yo unbundles the creation & existence of a message from the contents of a message, unbundling Whatsapp and Twitter :-). 8/Ev Williams (@ev) is the modern genius of this concept--playing out in our industry continuously since the 1950's. 9/The part people often miss is that you can get extremely powerful second/third order effects at each step with his pattern. 10/The entrepreneurs generally have a pretty good sense of this when they're doing it, but it doesn't become clear to others until later. 11/This is a pattern what we love to fund: unbundle X from Y, but then use the liberation of X as leverage to do amazing new things with X. 12/And the howls of press and analyst outrage at the apparent stupidity of each unbundling are very helpful for keeping valuations down :-). 1/The flip side of unbundling: Later on, the unbundlers tend to try to rebundle in the image of whatever they unbundled. 2/So Yahoo adds an ISP and Google adds email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes. 3/Twitter changes its user profile page to look more like Facebook :-). 4/Sun unbundled DEC with commodity components, then re-bundled into a proprietary computing stack just like DEC w/Solaris, Sparc, etc. 5/Microsoft likewise unbundled DEC minicomputers w/PC OS + tools, then rebundled into DEC-like integrated stack now including hardware (!). 6/Paraphrasing Harvey Dent: "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the company you first competed with." 7/And then sometimes the rebundlers realize what they're doing and try to reverse course. E.g. Microsoft building apps for iOS & Android. 8/And thus the cycle of life repeats with yet more unbundling :-).