[smartbear]

Mobile _phones_ did not go to startups. Making money off mobile -- whether apps that were impossible before, or features which advantaged certain companies who were able to be mobile-early or mobile-first, advantaged startups.

[marcosdumay]

A bit. There was enough space that the incumbents failed to notice a niche here or there. And in particular, Google left a relatively big portion of the ad market open for grabs.

But the incumbents succeeded in capturing most of the money involved with mobile. And only became more powerful after it.

[newsclues]

Yeah, there were startups from the mobile era, they just got bought.

I think the social media startups like instagram are a good example of the startups from the mobile era.

[npalli]

Only Apple had the phone, Google's phone is mostly for pushing innovation (not sales) and Meta doesn't have a phone or OS. In the final analysis, most of the value went to these guys not the hundreds/thousands of startups that got started on mobile. Whatever these startups did, these guys copied or bought and drove most of the value post-acquisition (ex. Insta/Meta). Uber is probably the biggest and it only just crossed $150B recently.

[smartbear]

What about Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and the many other companies that (arguably) were only possible because of smart phones?

[npalli]

Three different people are telling you that the majority of value accrued to the ones listed. Insta and Lyft are both under $10B while the other three got into trillions of dollars post mobile.