:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/53359335/620615622.0.jpg)
Before he was a venture capitalist, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew spent nearly two years managing Netscape — the post-Time-Warner-merger version, that is. And it taught him a powerful lesson about what separates the people who use technology from those who create it.
“Of course, Netscape was my homepage,” Liew said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “I would see the same article every day as the header on the Netscape homepage. I went to our editor in chief and [asked], ‘Why is this still on our homepage, on the fourth day in a row?’ It was like, ‘Top Ten Ways to Do Something,’ I don’t know. She said, ‘I’ll change it when people stop clicking on it.’”
“The point is, we use the internet differently than normal people do,” he added. “It was my homepage, and therefore because I was the general manager of the site, I was seeing it 10 times a day, 20 times a day. I was sick of seeing that same article, but normal people at that time were not logging onto the internet multiple times a day, every single day. It was new to them.”
Consumer habits have changed since the early 2000s, but tech’s bubble mentality has not, Liew said.
“If you lived here in Silicon Valley, and just judged from the experiences that you had, you’d think the Tesla Model S is the top-selling car in America,” he said.
He urged entrepreneurs to think about how their products will affect people in drastically different markets, from Middle America to third-world countries. If they don’t, they will risk being out-innovated by startups in those places that do see the unrealized opportunities.
“Silicon Valley is such an isolated bubble,” Liew said. “Our reality is not the reality of a normal American in normal America. And that is what is preventing as much insight and therefore innovation happening here.”
You can listen to Recode Decode in the audio player above, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:
- Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
- Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge's Lauren Goode, answers the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
- And Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, including the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn and Stitcher.
If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on iTunes — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
