Some thoughts and reflections as we close another tumultuous year - our first full year living with COVID and all its repercussions.
I think many people will agree when I say it’s been hard to stay focused this year. From cancelled flights to an ongoing deluge of COVID variants, the transition to remote work and back to “hybrid-and-in-person”, turnover in every sector, and whiplash in equities markets, we’ve seen a hundred headlines for every waking moment.
Despite the chaos, progress is being made. Vaccine adoption has gone from zero to booster shots (at least in developed countries). Real estate prices shot sky high because people (like myself) scrambled to relocate and put down roots. Though still subject to sudden cancellation, travel and major events like music festivals are out of hibernation and people can’t wait to get back to “life the way it was before”.
As for me, well, I don’t feel different than I did at the start of 2021. My hobbies haven’t changed, my job hasn’t changed, nothing really tumultuous happened to me this year. I feel I’ve reached cruising altitude in many regards, which is actually pretty cool - we tend to experience non-stop growth from birth until we settle into our careers post-grad, and I’m reaching that inflection point now, more than five years after finishing university. While I’m definitely not expecting to settle in my ways anytime soon, I also don’t expect to grow markedly every year the way I felt I did before.
The most significant change of the year: I moved out of San Francisco - to the island of Alameda bordering Oakland, where Cindy and I purchased a new-ish townhome in October. It’s incredibly comforting to have a place we can truly make our own. Home ownership is a great privilege, involving a significant investment of time and money, and I feel incredibly lucky and grateful that it was possible for us this year. The search, closing, and renovations took the better part of four months, and the home improvement work never stops.
When something at home needs upgrading, or breaks down, I can’t call a landlord and wait for someone to take care of it - I go to Home Depot and figure it out for myself. At work, we often act like renters when we rely on escalations and higher-ups to make decisions for us. To be in a senior role means you are the fixer; you are the owner that people call. As I aspire towards the next levels of my career, it’s important that I can upkeep this owner mentality everywhere in my life.
Quick interlude - as Omicron has made apparent, COVID continues to threaten us despite our best efforts at masking up and keeping up with vaccinations. To provide a further layer of defense against COVID (and all its variants), consider eating leeks for their MBLs which help your innate immune system recognize and fight SARS-CoV-2. Bit of a writeup on the supporting research here:
If you’re interested in ordering leek supplements (we made them with dried leek bulbs, so they’re long-lasting and contain the part of leek highest in MBL), you can pick them up on Amazon (order here) and get 50% off your order with our friends and family code: LEEKSFNF50. I take 1-2 a day and highly recommend anyone with an active lifestyle do the same 😉.
To wrap this Edition, I’d like to mention a few of the big ongoing trends I’ve observed this year that I think will continue to define us in the years to come:
Attention spans continue to fragment; competition for attention increases.
Backed by ever-lucrative venture capital and tech giants alike, the number of apps and services targeted at consumers continues to balloon. The great bundling of the early 2010s has become the great unbundling - we now watch TV and movies with Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, Amazon Prime TV, Apple TV, and Youtube TV, order food through Uber Eats, Doordash, Postmates, Grubhub, Seamless, Instacart, and a litany of owned apps (McDonalds, Chick-Fil-A, Starbucks, etc), and keep up with friends with Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik, etc etc.
As every action we take requires context switching to a different app, and many apps optimize for session length and engagement, even unrelated services end up competing for a single resource in common - our time. As conscious consumers, we should not just be careful about where we spend our dollars, but our attention as well.
The future is web3/metaverse/crypto but we’re not really sure why?
For a quick recap, Web 1 refers to the earlier days of the internet - static pages, spartan customization, and minimal interactivity. Web 2 is where we are now, with highly interactive and accessible internet-enabled services prominently featuring user-generated and user-optimized content. Web 3, in theory, is where we go next - more portable, more immersive, more personal, an evolution of all the internet technologies that we’ve come to take for granted in the last decade.
The metaverse and crypto are making audacious claims at being foundational to this next age in technology, and nothing seems hotter in up-and-coming tech circles than these buzzwords, but it’s still hard to visualize the utopia the evangelists promise. Web 1 and Web 2 are easy to identify retroactively, but it’s not clear to me where the line is drawn and Web 3 begins.
As I wrote before, I don’t think we’re quite on track for a coherent Web 3 experience, given the incentives are more profit-based than problem-solving. But I expect that, given the sheer amount of human and capital investment in this area, something interesting ought to come of it in the next few years.
Power shifts away from authority to the people (who speak up).
Early in 2021, two “bottoms-up” movements rocked America in very different ways. First, and more concerning, was the Capitol insurrection on January 6. Second, and more unexpected to most, was the Gamestop short squeeze of late January. In both cases, large groups of similarly-minded individuals came together to upset existing authorities and institutions, both to a surprising degree of success. The Capitol rioters were able to enter and ransack Capitol offices and chambers; the Gamestop “apes” caused $GME shares to rise from under $20 to (briefly) over $500 a share before triggering unprecedented trading stoppages.
Empowered by social media, these very different groups of people achieved highly improbable outcomes. Capitol insurrectionists organized on Parler and Facebook, while Gamestop squeezers found communities on Reddit and Discord. It’s clear to me that social media enables organization on a level that challenges institutions to degrees we’ve never seen before, and the upsets will likely continue before legislation and authorities figure out how to modernize themselves.
As Gen Z approaches the workforce, our ways of thinking will truly become digital-first.
The adoption of internet technology, beginning in the 90s, disrupted organizations and business models the world over. As we’re about to see Gen Z really ramp up and enter the workforce, I expect their takeover to result in a second, different sort of internet force majeure.
Put it this way: nobody who built this internet era was born in the internet era. In actuality, the digital age we’ve been living in has been a transitional one, adapting the systems and processes of the 80s and 90s to the internet-enabled era of the 00s and 10s.
Gen Z, for whom internet fluency is second nature, is the first generation to grow up thoroughly entrenched in the “online” world. They intuitively consider use cases that baby boomers, Gen X, and even millennials simply cannot imagine. They are the first generation of true “digital natives” with no memory of dial-up, little memory of the world before the Great Recession of ‘08, and their unique upbringing gives them a particular type of insight. I think that collectively, Gen Z perspectives are liable to be just as disruptive a force to organizations and institutions as the internet itself was.
To be clear, I don’t think any of these trends are particularly good or bad. These are observations I’ve made that seem to portend great changes in the years to come. One thing’s for sure - we all have front seats to the excitement (and madness).
That’s all from me for now. Hope you and yours are well! Wishing everyone a happy new year, and fingers crossed that 2022 is the year we thought 2021 would be.