Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital is Bullish on Alphabet and Amazon
- Medvis Jackson
- Feb 4, 2017
- 2 min read
As reported by Ari Levy of CNBC, Chamath Palihapitiya, the CEO and Founder of venture capital firm Social Capital is taking a bullish position on the future profitability of Amazon and Alphabet (a holding company created by Google founders), while having a skeptical outlook on Apple.
Apple Seeming to Lose it's Innovation Edge
Apple has in the past couple of years disappointed many investors and longtime users. After leading the developed world into a mobile first and fully integrated ecosystem with their iCloud storage products, iTunes market, iPhones and Mac Book hardware lines, the multi-billion dollar company has been in search of a real hit product.
The Apple Watch has yet to become the staple smart wear accessory it was intended to be, Apple Music still has just half the number of both paid and non-paying subscribers than Spotify, and the 2016 roll out of the new Mac Books left many of their core users feeling let down. The iPhone 7 was very profitable in terms of cell phones but did little to excite or amaze.
Instead, it seems as though Amazon and Google are better channeling the visionary spirit which the late and great Steve Jobs made to be synonymous with Apple.
Amazon and Alphabet building products for Future
Much of Chamath’s optimism for Amazon rests on their growth of marketshare. In many ways, Amazon is doing what Apple used to be so good at: changing the way we do everything.
Amazon helped to make the traditional retail store model antiquated, while also changing the way in which physical products and data are delivered to customers. Amazon box is even changing the way busy and diverse urbanites receive packages.
Pictured from Left to Right: Alphabet's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook of Apple.
As reported by Levy, Palihapitiya's belief in Amazon has become so great that he switched out of all of his Facebook stock and moved his position into Amazon. Chamath estimates that Amazon will gain a $3 trillion valuation within 10 years.
"There's a handful of exceptionally good companies but there's always one company that's the best," Levy quoted Palihapitiya as saying at the CB Insights Innovation Summit. "It does something that is just so fundamentally utilitarian and does it incrementally better everyday."
In a similar way, Alphabet has impressed Palihapitiya because of their expansion beyond search and cloud services and into machine based learning hadware. With automation emerging as the new paradigm for product development, Alphabet is positioning itself for future market share.
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Medvis Jackson is a curator at Kulchah, co-founder of #TheDigilogue and avid cricket fan. You can follow him @medvisjackson for his random thoughts. He primarily covers startup, tech and small business ecosystems and resources.
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