 Google.
Google’s mission, famously, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” New technologies are organizing information in fascinating new ways. One of our portfolio companies at Index, for instance, is Hebbia. You can think of Hebbia as Ctrl + F for contextual search. Instead of needing an exact match, you can ask Hebbia a question. Imagine an investment banking analyst trying to sift through an SEC filing to figure out reasons revenue is down; using Hebbia, the analyst can just type in the question.
As remote and hybrid work surge, meanwhile, we see knowledge management become central to companies: software like Guru, Notion, and Tango facilitate better organization of company content and information.
We’ve come a long way from index cards and public libraries. We’ve even come a long way from Google, the most successful company to emerge from the late-90s tech boom. It’s becoming easier and easier to organize vast quantities of information, and relatedly, to make that information readily accessible. Which brings us to…
Access to Content and Information
One of the forgotten eras of analog technology was the era of the pneumatic tube. Pneumatic tubes use compressed air or a vacuum to move capsules—and New York City ran on them.
Pneumatic tubes were actually originally intended to move people: one early New York demonstration sold 400,000 rides through a block-long human-sized tube. But moving people soon proved impractical (and dangerous), so pneumatic tubes focused on moving packages.
The tubes became staples in postal offices for moving mail and in hospitals for moving lab specimens and test results (some large hospitals still use them today for this purpose). Once, a sick cat was even sent through a pneumatic tube to a veterinarian.
As E.B. White wrote in 1949’s Here Is New York:
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube—pfft—just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils…
The distribution of content and information (and physical goods) has come a long way. Fax machines soon emerged. Then the internet came along and blew everything up.
You could argue Hebbia fits better in this bucket—and Hebbia certainly improves access to information, in addition to organization. But another interesting vector is broadening access by crowding in more content and information in the first place. There’s a lot of latent knowledge out there, and we’re now seeing startups work to unlock it. Reforge is building an “expert economy” to learn from world-class functional leaders in categories like growth marketing and product management. Office Hours lets you book time with an expert to tap their specialized knowledge. And Tegus offers a repository of company intelligence—thousands and thousands of transcripts with experts.
AI applies here too: in the old days, you might need to learn a new language through Duolingo or even a live human tutor; now you can turn to Speak and get instant feedback from an AI tutor.
Access is being approved—both in how we tap into pre-existing information, and how we expand the pool of information that’s out there.
Why does any of this matter? Technologies of the moment have far-reaching impacts on how people live and work. One example—
In 1950, 342,000 Americans worked as telephone operators for the Bell Telephone network—and another 1,000,000 worked for private phone operator companies. The US population at the time was ~150 million, meaning about 1 in 100 Americans (and 1 in 60 members of the labor force) worked as a phone operator. That’s a roughly equivalent portion to the share of the modern workforce employed by Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer.
But by 1984, the telephone was shifting to automated systems, and national employment was down to 40,000. By 2020, fewer than 2,000 Ame