Youtube is fascinating to me because it never made any sense. At the time they were starting bandwidth was expensive. How the hell did they pay the bills for that? And then every single rational piece of logic said they would be sued to oblivion due to copyright violations. Logically, Youtube should have been impossible, but here it is.

I often think about that when trying to evaluate forward looking tech. Even though 99% of the time logic like that proves to be correct, it's also true that most of the time the winners in a race did that exactly because they defined some piece of the standard framework of logic that everybody else played by. Uber is similar - they shouldn't exist, they basically broke the law in most countries they moved into, brazenly violated all kinds of barriers that kept taxi industry completely entrenched for decades. But now they are dominating in most of these countries.

Because there were external forces that helped propel and keep YT aloft. If smartphones and so on had not come into existence, it would have crashed and burned.

"Uber is similar - they shouldn't exist, they basically broke the law in most countries they moved into, brazenly violated all kinds of barriers that kept taxi industry completely entrenched for decades"

And here's a simple way to demonstrate my point - backed by VC - Uber accelerated its growth and got to the point it was so widely adopted nobody could stop them from operating.