Coming up with the idea of a portable personal computing device is easy. It's even possible to manufacture it (e.g. the Apple Newton). However it won't affect people's lives until it is quite polished. Similarly figuring out that people want to stream all their music is easy. The innovation in getting it to work, overcoming complex technological and social barriers is hard to explain to outsiders and less obvious. But it opens up these 'old things' to new people who couldn't access them before.

For another unicorn, clearly opening up new things to people: Oculus, though it wasn't the first virtual reality headset.

Oculus was the first to realize that we now have the technology to do VR right and forget about all the failed attempts from the 90s.

I don't think you can look at DBNT in the vein of first to try. I think what A16Z is saying is are the things you're doing common activities in the existing population.

So Google was just another search engine, therefore, it was DOTB

Apple, computers were not mainstream, the others can be debated. So Apple computer was DBNT.

Before Spotify streaming of any music you wanted (almost) was not mainstream, therefore they were DBNT

NVIDIA...I'm not sure I can comment, sure, they weren't the first GPU, but did they push the industry to be able to do things that couldn't be done before? Or were they just riding the adoption curve? Anybody able to answer that?