@FinanceYF5: The moment of rebuilding the consumer internet world has come 1/ In the past few years, consumer internet had 'nothing to do' because the old world was already built. a16z's new partner Josh Elman (early core at Facebook/Twitter/Robinhood) said: the door to world rebuilding is open again
Summary
a16z's new partner Josh Elman points out that the world of consumer internet is ushering in a moment of rebuilding. The old world is already built, and the door to new opportunities is open again.
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The moment for consumer internet reconstruction has arrived
1/ In the past few years, “there was nothing to do” in consumer internet — because the old world was already built.
a16z’s newest partner Josh Elman (early core at Facebook/Twitter/Robinhood) says: the door to world reconstruction has opened again.
2/ Elman’s core judgment: it takes two things happening at once to open the window of opportunity.
【First】AI has fundamentally changed what ordinary users can do 【Second】Gen Alpha are native world builders — growing up on Roblox and Minecraft, they have zero preconceptions about “how an app should work”
3/ The pattern he has witnessed: the greatest products were all laughed off as toys in the early days.
Twitter was called “a dumb site where people post what they ate for breakfast” Robinhood was called “no one will trade real money on it” http://Musical.ly was just teens making music videos — then it became TikTok
Worlds take time to take shape.
4/ AI has pushed the door open
ChatGPT made ordinary users comfortable with open-ended conversations with software for the first time.
But the bigger shift: users can finally express their needs in natural language, and software is now capable of turning those needs into actions.
5/ Why is the window different now?
Models are ready. Inference costs are dropping, on-device models are running.
His take: what matters isn’t the model itself, but the 【usage frameworks, loop mechanisms, and context design】 built around the model — that’s the real opportunity for the next generation of consumer products.
6/ Which teams is he most excited to see?
Ones that look like toys early on, but the founder has a much bigger world in mind — it’s just not built yet.
That’s exactly what Elman has done his entire career: laying tracks, drawing maps, and pouring foundations in the messiest middle phase.
7/ It’s 2026. When was the last time consumer internet felt like this?
What do you think the next consumer AI product that “looks like a toy” will be?
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