Kara Swisher, the author and journalist who covered technology and the early days of the Internet from San Francisco, has a new book.
In a recent exclusive interview with TheStreet, Swisher discussed a few predictions she has made over the years and the way she views how they turned out, both right and wrong.
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"Burn Book" is Swisher's account of what publisher Simon and Schuster calls "the inside story we've all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world."
Sara Silverstein, TheStreet's Editor-In-Chief, asked Swisher about her new book. "In a lot of it you talk about a lot of the predictions you made in tech that have been right over and over again. Which of those are you most proud of, that was most shocking to the industry, that you were right about?"
Kara Swisher talks about the trajectory of the early Internet
Swisher began by looking about 25 years into the past, recalling what it was like trying to guess how the new technology would progress and affect other industries.
"A lot of them, I don't remember because we had a lot of scoops and things like that," Swisher said. "But I think one thing is the very basic fact that everything that can be digitized would be digitized."
"I think it's kind of an obvious thing," she continued. "But 25 years ago ... the idea that every industry would be changed by what was happening in tech."
To take a more recent instance, Swisher discussed a prediction she made about how social media might fuel former President Donald Trump's ability to communicate with his supporters — and what the repercussions of that fact might become.
"I think more recently when I wrote that column in the New York Times, sort of predicting the insurrection and how ... I talked about the lies Donald Trump would tell," Swisher said. "It would shoot up and down the ecosystem, the digital ecosystem of the right."
"And then he'd ask them to do something to stop the election," she added. "And when I did it, I got a lot of pushback from social media sites because I said, I called them handmaidens to sedition, essentially. And I think I felt good about being right about that, though I felt I wish I was wrong, I guess."
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Swisher addressed some predictions that did not work out
Silverstein asked Swisher about predictions she had been wrong about.
"You know, at first, when eBay (EBAY) , when they visited me and I went to look at what they were doing, I thought it was a stupid idea," Swisher said. "I just was like, I don't get this. I don't get it at all. And I think I was wrong about that."
"And now, look, eBay is not doing as well, but the idea was a great one, the idea of marketplaces," Swisher said. "And for some reason in that case, I couldn't wrap my head around it."
Swisher added another important marketplaces business she didn't support initially.
"I was not a supporter of Amazon (AMZN) , but I thought they would do a lot better than most of the press thought at the time when they called them Amazon-dot-bomb," Swisher said. "I thought Jeff Bezos was a great entrepreneur and directionally it was correct."
"Others, you know, Webvan, so many others failed," she added. "But I did believe in commerce after that. But marketplace was something I missed."
Swisher also discussed some early valuations that didn't make sense to her, including what happened after the 2007 Facebook (META) announcement that it would receive a $240 million investment from Microsoft (MSFT) .
"When Facebook got a $15 billion valuation after the Microsoft investment, I was gobsmacked and I thought it was stupid and I said so," she recalled. "And I was wrong because what they did is they grew into it. They sort of faked it till they made it kind of thing. And I just didn't think that the market would sustain these crazy valuations. But I should have known because they did it before."
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