It’s hard to believe, but…
Ten years ago…
- The first video was uploaded to YouTube.
- Facebook, then just a year old, dropped “the” from its old URL “thefacebook.com” after acquiring “facebook.com” for $200K.
- An early prototype of an autonomous car completed the DARPA Grand Challenge for the first time.
- The term “drone” meant a military weapon system.
- Bitcoin and blockchain didn’t exist, and wouldn’t be created for three more years.
- Android was a small startup that Google had just acquired.
- There were 6.4 billion humans on Earth, only ~1 billion were online, and none of them had heard of Uber or AirBnb.
Today…
- YouTube has more than a billion users who watch hundreds of millions of hours of video every day. Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- Facebook has 1.4 billion users from every country on Earth.
- Every major car manufacturer is working on an autonomous model, and Google’s autonomous cars have logged over 1 million miles driving themselves.
- Drones are now used by children, can be purchased at prices ranging from $50 to $1,500. The largest consumer drone company DJI (which was started in 2006) is valued at $10 billion.
- Bitcoin and blockchain companies have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital and are poised to be potentially as disruptive as the Internet itself.
- Google now has over 1 billion active Android users.
- Today, there are close to 7.4 billion humans on Earth, and ~3 billion are now online.
- Uber, which was started in 2009, is valued at over $40 billion, and AirBnb, started in 2007, valued over $20 billion.
These are only a few of the fun examples of exponential change from the last decade. The question is: what will the world look like a decade from now? In a few days, I will be releasing an article I wrote for the Huffington Post’s 10-year anniversary. It contains a few of my predictions for the next 10 years, and an explanation as to why I believe we are living in the most exciting time ever. Stay tuned…
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