David E. Liddle

Photographer: Thomas Broening

Partner, U.S. Venture Partners

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit microprocessor.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Wireless.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Fiber-optic communications. First of all, that it became a medium for communications at all. Second, the huge increase in the amount of data carried by a single fiber—and how beautifully and with how little loss. It replaced microwave links and all this other crazy stuff and drove the cost of communications so low that everyone could go around running fiber—and, unfortunately, they did.

"In the past, in many industries, much of the economic value chain—the ultimate price paid for a product—was shared with all the intermediaries, like stores and distributors. Moving things online as quickly as is practical shortens this chain. Cisco, for example, does billions of dollars of business with no salesperson involved. The customer places the order and the computer causes the device to be built, or at least extracted from the warehouse and shipped. It's not just about distribution but also about eliminating intermediaries. It's about the wave of changes that occur when methods based on old technologies don't work in the modern world.

"It's now very easy to do things that were once hard. Take stealing text. In the past, you could get a copy of a textbook out of the library and photocopy every page. Now, copying it online is easy, and it's free, so everyone does it. It's not that more people have become wicked; it's just that theft has gotten easier."