I’m late to this, but let’s do it anyway. Here are some predictions and pontifications for the next decade. Some I really believe and others not so much…although I wouldn’t be shocked if they happened.
Travel
- Air drone taxies – we’ll be calling for on demand pick ups only we’ll get picked up and delivered by flying drones designed to transport humans short distances.
- Commercial space travel – this is happening. I’ll be buying a ticket.
Energy
- Clean energy will represent one of the biggest opportunities and we’ll see companies take off that focus on carbon reduction, water sanitation, and solar energy.
- Battery innovation will continue. Long TESLA
- Nuclear energy will make a comeback
- The energy grid will begin to decentralize. People will get tired of blackouts and intermitted service from their energy grids designed decades ago.
US Politics
- The politics pendulum swings more violently back to the other side and then at some point the pendulum breaks. We’ll see more unrest as the wealth gap continues to increase, which also fuels continued and growing antisemitism and then at some point, a legitimate conflict here at home.
- The space force completes its first media-worthy mission
Geo Politics
- The middle east alliances shift and old enemies become allies
- China officially becomes the global super power largely due to their government structure enabling them to play the long game, despite limiting freedoms among their citizens.
Money and economy
- Trillionaires!
- The ‘haves and haves not divide’ gets even bigger. This isn’t good.
- Cryptocurrency becomes a legitimate and regulated means of monetary currency among some countries.
Education
- The college business model blows up. Student debt is the next bubble, even after the debt obligations have been pushed out for longer payback periods. At some point, it just breaks.
- The rise of “Influencer teachers.” Much like we see instagram influencers today make a lot of money promoting products, we’ll see “influencer teachers” doing precisely that: teaching. Only they’ll get paid for it because the millennial generation and their kids prefer to get the ‘right’, supplemental and cost effective tutoring and education for their kids.
- Chemistry and biology > Computer Science because we need to fix the physical world. More jobs here, more students here. It becomes the new hot thing to study.
- Genetics > Chemistry because we need to fix and alter people that can save the world. This is also more effective and cheaper medicine. This too becomes the new hot thing to study.
Medicine
- CRISPR technology will commercialize and will disrupt the traditional pharmaceutical industries replacing the current chemistry-driven supply chain pharma and medicine companies. For example, instead of taking insulin for diabetes, you get your genes sliced up to never need insulin in the first place. A lot more money gets invested here.
Social and digital media
- We see a new social network pop up that reminds us a lot like MySpace. A site that supports creative expression but does so in a way that feels messy. And people love it.
- The oasis is here! See Ready Player One. In fact, this medium becomes ‘mainstream media’ with more users and eyeballs spending time in it either playing games together, watching shows together, gambling and more.
Ecomm & CPG
- 100x the startup CPG brands that we see today because it becomes easier than ever to start an independent CPG brand with products and companies like Shopify making it dead simple to get up and running.
SaaS
- We of course see more and more SaaS startups pop up, which also means we’ll need more ways to get those tools talking to one another to enable business to make sense of their information and customers.
- Homogenization of business and customer data will become a priority for every company
- Interacting with this information in an easy and human way will be more important than ever so we’ll see the increased adoption of conversational mediums for work whether voice enabled or more purely messaging mediums
Health and beauty
- More clean products. Clean ingredients. Clean and reusable packaging.
- Plant based everything
Investing
- Startup investing looks more like public equity investing. We’ll have an NYSE or Nasdaq of sorts for private companies.
- More people can and will invest. Simply, we’ll see more angel investors.
- Rise of the founder/investor incubator model where former operators don’t want to start just one company, but don’t want to only invest either. Instead, they want to leverage their operating background plus access to capital to get more shots on net within their own firm or incubation studio. More of these.
E-Sports
- Biggest sport on earth as measured by viewers and liquidity through the ecosystem.
- Pro gamers are celebrities. We’ll know many, many more by first name. My parents included.
Religion
- Much like scientology became a topic of discussion in the main stream zeitgeist, we’ll see another new religion of some kind pop up. It can and will likely be a scam or cult, but we’ll see it and hear about it.
That’s my list for now. It will be fun to revisit this at some point in the future. Surely I’ll be wrong but it’s great to get it on paper.
Tags: Predictions