Success Quote by John Doerr

There is something almost comically unambitious about John Doerr’s line: “We all know about blogs and how big they are.” Coming from a venture capitalist whose job is to see the next thing before everyone “all knows” it, the sentence reads less like insight than like a throat-clear. That’s the point. In business culture, especially the Silicon Valley variety Doerr helped shape, consensus is a tool. Declaring something obvious isn’t informational; it’s strategic.

The intent is to establish common ground fast, the rhetorical equivalent of clicking “accept” on the shared terms of a conversation. “We all know” is a soft act of coercion: it flattens dissent, discourages follow-up questions, and quietly separates insiders from anyone who might ask, “Do we?” Then “how big they are” performs another sleight of hand. “Big” is a vibe-word, not a metric. It signals cultural dominance (everyone’s talking about them) while conveniently dodging business specifics (revenue, retention, defensibility). That vagueness is useful when you’re trying to position a trend as inevitable without litigating its actual value.

Context matters: blogs were one of the first mass, bottom-up disruptions of media authority, a proof that distribution had been unbundled from institutions. For investors and operators, acknowledging their “bigness” was a way to concede the shift without conceding control. The subtext is a pivot: if blogs are already “big,” the real opportunity isn’t to marvel at them but to build the platforms, ad systems, and analytics that monetize the attention they pry loose.