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No. The reason there are few FANGS is that they are platform businesses, and the value of their services is proportional (or more?) to the size of their user bases.

This means winner-takes-all. There were others, but they did not grow users as fast, so they lost.

Another thing to point out is that while search and ads is Google's revenue, with chrome, gmail, android, etc they are achieving a form of lock-in. If anyone else "owned" these surfaces, replacing their search box would be much easier.

The spread risk investment strategy is also correct, since the value of any platform market is low before the winner emerges. After the winner emerges, the value of that platform is the value of the entire market.



> they are platform businesses, and the value of their services is proportional (or more?) to the size of their user bases.

I don't have much to add here, but this is known as a network effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect


nfx.com is a great source of different thesis on well, network effects in tech. They're also a VC


There literally are more FAANGs than there were in 2008, when he wrote this.

Even Google itself was much smaller than it is now. A google's in a 2008 sense would not qualify as a new FAANG in 2020 terms.




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