The Gap Between Early Adopters and Everyone Else Has Gotten Enormous

I’ve been looking at the new Tesla Model YL lately (I know, I know), largely because I’m hearing incredible things about the latest full self driving (FSD), and I don’t love driving.

I saw a tweet about a guy named David Moss who drove 25,000 miles on FSD without touching the wheel once. That’s a year of driving without, well, driving.

I don’t think the rest of the world knows how good some technology has become. Interestingly, the disparity is not confined to geography (though the Bay Area does remains the most “ahead”), or even wealth (many Uber drivers in NYC have Teslas), it may simply be that the gap between the early adopters and the “normals” has gotten quite large.

In San Francisco, hailing a Waymo is becoming the norm. Meanwhile most of the country has never sat in one, and I know plenty of smart, curious people who haven’t opened Claude or launched an AI agent.

The people living inside tech are already living in the future – it may be a year ahead or it may be 10, I’m not quite sure? But this difference matters a lot for tech investing.

The challenge is that we investors/founders assume everyone else is on the cutting edge alongside us, and we invest accordingly. But then a dinner with old friends reminds you they’re very much not, and may not be for some time (for various reasons).

I’m not sure how to square all this but it does make me wonder if we’re just a bit too far over our skis?