Talking to ... Benedict Evans

One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital
age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological
changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an
independent observer, he started his career at various venture
capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz,
Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over
175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse
as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually
matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University
of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is
imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological
innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which
they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday
world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is
often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a
conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns:
From one moment to the next, you jump from an
industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment
with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why
saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is
experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good
manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of
how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation,
among many others in our conversation with him.


Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter
and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to
major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa,
Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq,
Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone.


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