Excellent! Why haven’t I heard of Ivan before? Such a cool interview. There’s so much that I want to quote. Here’s almost a random excerpt that I liked:
“…I like to give the example of a ‘startuper’ named Johann Gutenberg. Yes, by today’s standards, he would be a CTO. He invented the printing press, he invented printing technology, which is a technology that made it possible to disseminate information on a scale that was previously impossible. Then radio became that kind of technology, then television, then the internet. There he made the printing press, but he wouldn’t have ‘gone far’ with his press alone. There are examples of people who made similar printing presses but didn’t become as famous.
So what was the trick? He found himself a good CEO. This CEO lived nearby. Martin Luther. He came to Gutenberg, looked at the press and said: ‘We’ll print the Bible because it’s unclear what else to print.’ And Gutenberg says, ‘Fire, what an idea!’ They started printing the Bible in Latin, but people didn’t read it, it was unclear what was written. Let’s translate it, – yes, the CEO says: ‘We need to print the Bible in German, then it will sell well.’ You know, wait, people are illiterate. The CEO thinks we need pictures, so they went to a designer. What was the designer’s name? His name was Dürer, he also lived nearby in the same city. He drew engravings, the engravings in the Bible went down well with those who couldn’t read, and the texts went down well with those who could. And then Luther went to sell it. Well, to give out, to sell, here the story varies, but one way or another – boom, just an explosion, a new technology! People started to think on top of it: ‘Okay, the Bible is cool, but everyone has already bought the Bible, what will be our next theme?’ Yeah, kind of, and then someone gets carried away and says: ‘Ho, a book ‘How to recognize a witch’. That’s a theme that really takes off. A lot of people died because the books ‘How to recognize a witch’ spread mass. Essentially, fake news’.”
This is certainly a beautiful story, but Luther and Dürer were born several years after Gutenberg’s death, which Ivan definitely knows, but with this fact, the beautiful story just doesn’t hold up.
UPDATE: Ivan replied to my comment on YouTube: “…I actually got it mixed up. Lisa and the team added a clarification, and I wrote about this in response to another comment. I meant Hans Lufft and Cranach. They worked with Luther. The first printed, the second illustrated.”
Also, I can’t remember whether it was him or Ilia Strebulaev from a recent ‘Editors’ video, mentioned that in the early years of Google as a startup, there were already search engines on the market, but Google eventually displaced them all and now holds 93% of the market. I tried to recall what these search engines were, and besides AltaVista and Yahoo, nothing much came to mind. Guess I’m not old enough yet. Started researching. Besides altavista (1995-2013), these were lycos, excite (1994), infoseek (1995), hotbot (1996), webcrawler (1994-2001), ask jeeves (1996), yahoo (1994).
Definitely listen to Ilia Strebulaev too. He talks about venture in the Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxBBzRp0lcM
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 