The $4B Barrier to Beating Google
A decade ago, I had calculated that a startup would need at least $1B (but more likely $4B) of capex to match Google if trying to use conventional crawl/index tech. 🧵
With conventional tech, quality upper bound is more or less fixed so you are forced to compete on breadth which is super expensive. With model-based index, you need < $100M capex to get proverbial flywheel going because you can sacrifice breadth for different notion of quality.
This is a game changer because we will soon see dozen or so strong startups each trying to leverage, cost optimize and improve this tech just like the old days of search engines.