“The use of connectivity is still only just beginning; many areas that will be transformed by software and the internet in the next decade or two have barely been touched.”
Why Benedict is the canonical Analyst
Benedict Evans spent the first decade of his career moving through every institutional layer that produces technology opinion — sell-side equity research at investment banks, then strategy and media roles at Orange, Channel 4, and NBC Universal, then mobile-focused analysis at London firm Enders Analysis. In 2014 he joined Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco, where for six years he served as a general partner and became one of the most widely read voices in venture-backed tech. He returned to London in 2020 as an independent analyst, and the work he does there is a precise illustration of what the Analyst role is for.
Evans publishes a weekly newsletter that has grown to nearly 200,000 subscribers — senior leaders at Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey, alongside more than 600 founders and CEOs. Twice a year he releases a large-format presentation that maps macro shifts in technology: how smartphones restructured retail, why software ate distribution, what AI is doing to the economics of every industry. These decks circulate across boardrooms without attribution, which is itself a measure of how clearly they cut. His method is not prediction but structural diagnosis — identifying which questions are actually worth asking about a technology cycle before consensus has formed around easy answers.
The Mobile cycle is where Evans built his reputation, and his output across that wave — on platform dynamics, on the gap between access and utility, on how incumbents fail to see new form factors — became reference material for how serious independent analysis operates. Where analysts embedded in firms produce work that serves client relationships, Evans's independence is load-bearing: the newsletter's 50 percent open rate reflects an audience that reads for signal, not reassurance. The Analyst role is durable precisely because credible independent analysis is scarcest when it is most needed — during busts, when everyone needs to understand what actually happened. Evans built the infrastructure for that before the bust arrived.
The Analyst understands patterns, evaluates technologies and markets. See the Analyst role → · Read the full Analyst deep-dive →
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