Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
New tech now spreads in half the time
Diffusion pays for frontiers
A frontier technology pays off only when it spreads. Once the foundational work is finished, diffusion is what turns it into revenue, so the faster a technology reaches people, the more valuable the breakthrough behind it becomes.
That revenue funds more frontier work, which brings the next breakthrough sooner. Adoption speed and invention speed feed each other, and adoption has been getting faster.
How AI fits
AI shows the pattern. It emerged when the learnings and compute in one place met new algorithms and frameworks, producing a new paradigm of intelligence. A billion users in five years means that paradigm is already paying for the next one.
Why do new technologies spread faster each time?
Later technologies ride on infrastructure that earlier ones already built. Economists Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn studied how 25 technologies spread across countries and found that newer inventions reached other nations faster than older ones. The internet used existing telephone lines and personal computers, and chatbots use existing phones and browsers. The first consumer dial-up connections in the 1990s ran over ordinary telephone lines.
How does adoption pay for the next breakthrough?
Revenue from widely used products flows back into research labs. Bell Labs was financed largely by AT&T's telephone business, and its researchers demonstrated the first transistor in December 1947. The transistor later became the building block of every computer chip. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
What held back early internet adoption?
Getting online in the early 1990s required a personal computer, a modem, a paid account, and a phone line that was tied up during use. Little on the web was worth looking at. The Mosaic browser, released by the University of Illinois's National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1993, put pictures and links on the same page and made the web easy for ordinary users. Netscape, started by Mosaic's creators, released its own browser in 1994.
More from Lightspeed Venture Partners
