Research
Back to researchResearch sweep · deep · 1995 – 2026
Compounding Waves — How Each Tech Era Built the Substrate, and the Skills, for the Next
The compounding economic logic of three successive technology waves from January 1995 to May 2026 — internet disintermediation of distribution, software-defined platforms and cloud infrastructure, and the current AI/agentic systems wave — examining the technical, economic and human-skills dependencies that make each wave a precondition for the next, the new categories of work each wave created, and whether the relationship is best understood as cumulative compounding or as externalised costs harvested by later layers.
- financial
- academic
- blogs
- vc
Synthesised 2026-05-11
Full brief
Read the synthesised summary→
Three technology waves have run in sequence since January 1995: internet disintermediation of distribution (1995–2005), software-defined platforms and cloud infrastructure (2005–2015), and the AI/agentic systems wave now consuming roughly half of all venture capital. Each wave produced artefacts that became…
Research lanes
4 lanes
academic
25 sources
Academic & arXiv
The foundational dependency chain across all three technology waves is most visible in the scaling-law literature. Kaplan et al. (2020, arXiv) established that language model performance scales as a power law with compute, data, and parameters across seven…
Read lane →
blogs
25 sources
Blogs & Independent Thinkers
The dominant analytical frame across independent blogs is Ben Thompson's Stratechery, which provides the most coherent through-line across all three waves. His 2015 Aggregation Theory piece identified how zero marginal distribution costs rewired industry…
Read lane →
financial
25 sources
Financial Press
The dominant story in the financial press from 2023 to 2026 is a capital-allocation event of historical scale whose productivity justification remains contested. Bloomberg Intelligence projects hyperscalers will commit more than $3.5 trillion in AI-related…
Read lane →
vc
25 sources
VC & Analyst Reports
The VC and analyst record across 1995–2026 is most coherently read as a succession of substrate-and-application pairs, each of which required the prior wave's infrastructure to exist. Andreessen's 2011 'Software Is Eating the World' essay, republished and…
Read lane →