World powerful tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have uncertain future and will not last more than 50 years, according to Scott Galloway, a serial entrepreneur and author.
With the business life cycle getting faster and faster, a child born today will outlive all of these firms. The fatality rate among our species, and firms, is 100%, said Galloway in an interview with Marketwatch. “The only thing I am comfortable saying is they will all go out of business, all disappear within 50 years,” he added.
He referred these tech giants as the “Four Horseman” in his first book, The Four, which talks about them and debuted at #5 on the New York Times Bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. Galloway was a serial entrepreneur before teaching at NYU, founding nine companies including L2, a research company, and Red Envelope, an online gift-giving site that was one of the e-commerce busts of the first dot-com era.
Amazon will outlast all
However, he thinks Amazon is going to outlast all the other companies in long run because of its growth.
“If you are trying to pick the one, the good money right now is on Amazon. Out of the other three, Amazon is winning. Amazon competes with Google in several areas, including search, and while Google dominates search as a whole, in the key area of product search, Amazon’s share of product search has gone from 44% in 2015 to 55% in 2016,” Galloway said.
Valuation is illusionary trick
He also talked about valuations game and said that it is good time to be private company.
Galloway said companies like Uber, with a valuation of $70 billion according to recent company press releases — would likely be worth much less if subjected to the scrutiny of the public market.
In US, ride-hailing firm Uber competitor, Lyft, was valued at $7.5 billion in its latest funding round in April, just one-tenth of Uber’s reported valuation. “This valuation number is hard to even call it a number,” Galloway reasoned. “Valuation number is an illusionist’s trick”, he said.
Talking about Samsung, he said it could be the male version of Apple, but needs to take control of their distribution.
For startups, he said they should be fast, hire good people, raise as much money as possible, and sell to avoid crush from the Four. He hailed Netflix for pivoting from DVDs in envelopes to streaming was visionary.
