The Cloud Decade (2015-2022)
AWS becomes a $60B business. Cryptocurrencies + NFTs swing through every news cycle. AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol. Stripe, Slack, Zoom redefine the SaaS playbook. The remote-work pivot.
Part of Technology
26 moments in this segment.
- — Zoom Becomes the World's Office. March 2020. Zoom's daily active users go from 10M (Dec 2019) to 300M (April 2020) as the world locks down. The pandemic-era video-conferencing standard; "Zoom fatigue" enters the cultural lexicon.
- — Falcon 9 First Landing — Live Stream. December 21, 2015. SpaceX Falcon 9 lands at Cape Canaveral after delivering payload to orbit. The control-room eruption is one of the most rewatched moments in modern aerospace.
- — Discord Launches. May 13, 2015. Jason Citron launches Discord — initially for gamers; becomes the default community platform of the late 2010s. 200M monthly active by 2024.
- — AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol — Move 37. March 2016. Game 2 Move 37 — AlphaGo's creative shoulder hit. Commentators thought it was a bug. Lee Sedol left the room. The single most-discussed AI move ever made.
- — Figma Public Beta. October 2016. Figma — collaborative browser-based design tool — exits beta. By 2024: industry-standard product-design platform; Adobe's $20B acquisition attempt blocked by antitrust 2023.
- — TikTok Goes Global. August 2018. ByteDance merges Musical.ly into TikTok internationally. By 2021, the most-downloaded app in the world. The first non-American social platform to achieve global Western mainstream scale.
- — Tesla Model 3 Launches. July 28, 2017. Tesla Model 3 ships. By 2023, the best-selling EV in the world. Made electric cars mainstream; forced every legacy automaker to commit to EVs by mid-decade.
- — Tesla Model 3 Reveal. July 28, 2017. Tesla Model 3 launch event at the Fremont factory. The car that took Tesla mass-market; ~$35,000 starting price; over 500,000 reservations within a week.
- — TikTok Launches Globally. August 2018. ByteDance merges Musical.ly into TikTok. Within 3 years: most-downloaded app in the world.
- — Falcon Heavy Starman Launch. February 6, 2018. First Falcon Heavy launch. Payload: Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster with a mannequin in a spacesuit ("Starman") on a heliocentric orbit past Mars.
- — Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower. March 17, 2018. Christopher Wylie's Cambridge Analytica disclosure on Channel 4 News. The interview that turned data-privacy into a global political issue and accelerated GDPR enforcement.
- — Zuckerberg Senate Testimony. April 10-11, 2018. Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress over Cambridge Analytica. "Senator, we run ads" became one of the defining viral exchanges of 2010s tech politics.
- — Fortnite + Marshmello Concert. February 2, 2019. Marshmello plays a virtual concert inside Fortnite to 10M+ concurrent players. The first widely-attended metaverse event; predated Meta's rebrand by 32 months.
- — WeWork S-1 + Adam Neumann. August 2019. WeWork files S-1. Within weeks: IPO postponed, Adam Neumann ousted, valuation crashes from $47B to $8B. The defining late-decade Silicon Valley fall-from-grace.
- — Zoom CEO Eric Yuan on the Pandemic. March-April 2020. Eric Yuan interviews as Zoom DAU goes from 10M to 300M. "Zoom fatigue" enters the lexicon; remote work becomes a category.
- — Snowflake IPO. September 16, 2020. Snowflake goes public; largest software IPO in history at $33B valuation. Defined the cloud-data-warehouse category.
- — Apple M1 Reveal. November 10, 2020. Apple's M1 reveal. First Apple Silicon in a Mac. 16-hour battery life on a MacBook Air; Intel's 14-year run inside Mac ends.
- — Facebook Rebrands as Meta. October 28, 2021. Mark Zuckerberg rebrands Facebook's parent company to Meta, signalling a "metaverse" pivot. Reality Labs has lost $50B+ on metaverse R&D through 2024 — but Meta's 2024 AI pivot recovers most market-cap losses.
- — GitHub Copilot Reveal. June 29, 2021. GitHub Copilot launches in technical preview. First widely-used AI pair-programmer; built on OpenAI Codex. The product that proved generative AI could do real software-engineering work.
- — Jeff Bezos Goes to Space. July 20, 2021. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin New Shepard flight on the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11. "Best day ever!" Critics: $5.5B+ on a 10-minute joyride.
- — Roblox IPO. March 10, 2021. Roblox direct-lists at $45B valuation. By 2024: 80M daily active users (over half under 13). The first true mass-market metaverse platform.
- — Crypto Super Bowl Commercials. February 13, 2022. Super Bowl LVI runs $400M of crypto ads — FTX, Crypto.com, Coinbase. Larry David in FTX's "Don't miss out." Eight months later FTX collapsed; the commercial became one of the all-time advertising disaster reels.
- — Musk Walks Into Twitter HQ With a Sink. October 26, 2022. Elon Musk walks into Twitter HQ carrying a kitchen sink: "Let that sink in!" Days before he closes the $44B acquisition. The first of many viral moments from his Twitter ownership.
- — Stable Diffusion — Launch Demo. August 2022. Emad Mostaque's Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion. Open-source; runs on a consumer GPU. The first generative-image model anyone could run locally.
- — ChatGPT Launch Tweet. November 30, 2022. Sam Altman: "today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here." 100M users in 60 days — fastest consumer-product growth in history.
- — Stable Diffusion. August 22, 2022. Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion — the first generative-image model anyone can run on a consumer GPU. Open-source. Triggers the AI-art era; transforms the entire creative industry within months.
