These are some of the things I observed in the last decade, written in no specific order. Some of these can spawn ideas, or just create discussion. Feel free to reach out to chat.
- Interest rates dropped to incredible lows relative to US history, spawning a bull market that has been one of the longest in recent decades.
- Software ate the world.
- Inflation is here, just not evenly distributed.
- More time than ever before in the history of humanity was spent playing video games during this decade.
- Colleges are more expensive than ever before.
- Passive investing went mainstream. The world is OK buying a LOT of companies at average prices.
- The world was largely peaceful, barring the absence of any major wars, with the US winding down it’s existing wars.
- The new model of content consumption is less about renting a specific title or song, it is about renting the option to watch a group of titles.
- The biggest content company in the world went Direct to Consumer, disintermediating the distributors and getting access to consumer data directly.
- Netflix proved to the world that it is able to generate somewhat watchable content powered by data (and debt).
- It’s easier than ever to make music, video or any form of content. Harder than ever to find a paying audience, despite better distribution.
- VR failed to deliver on it’s promise. AR shows promising potential.
- Bitcoin goes mainstream. Positively correlated with negative developments in world politics (wars, inflation). Digital Gold thesis holds.
- Venture Capital goes from a specialized asset class to a mainstream asset class that (1) deploys a lot of capital (2) hires a lot of people to help deploy the capital. As a corollary to (1) and (2), it hence follows that VC returns are going to stagnate over the next decade.
- The risk of starting a technology company is at an all time low. For founders, distribution is still king.
- Brokerages adopt zero fee across the board. Money is now made from order flow, and less from commissions.
- A lot of technology companies were started and sold.
- The rise of the Chief Growth Officer, and the decline of the traditional CMO. Metrics and Impact drive marketing outcomes.
- Amazon goes beyond an everything store to become an everything company.
- The decade of the cloud, as companies flock to rent rather than build their own servers.
- The Internet is now where groups of people gather, interact and socialize. There is a premium on face to face/offline interaction.
- Online Dating/Matchmaking is no longer culturally taboo.
- Data everywhere, and an abundance of it. More tools to collect, ingest and warehouse data and not as many tools to make sense of it.
- The rise of the data scientist as a full time profession.
- AI starts achieving breakthrough precision in certain narrow domain fields.
- The Privatization of the Space Industry has started in full flow.
- The US-China relationship that powered the last 15 years of economic growth is now under strain as affluent China contends with it’s own agenda in the world. I suspect India will be next.
- A lot of talk, but very little progress on Climate Change and reducing our carbon footprint.
- Algorithms began to permeate culture, beyond newsfeeds, into what goes into your music playlists and what gets watched on video platforms.
- Big Content Franchises – Star Wars, Marvel continue to dominate popular culture. The presence of a quality long tail has only reinforced the power of iconic brands, rather than weaken them.
- Silicon Valley’s influence over the world spiked in the early decade, then diminished. Trust in the valley to self-regulate is currently low.
- Antitrust Government locked it’s targets onto Big Tech for the first time.
- Apple continues to sell a ridiculous amount of iPhones.
- SaaS companies are being slowly better understood by the marketplace. Valuations are still expecting the world of them going into the next decade.