The new roaring twenties are coming.
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Editor’s note: 2020, when everything went wrong, is over, and the light at the end of the tunnel is faintly visible. Just like the roaring twenties that ushered in a cultural explosion after experiencing the Spanish flu in the last century, after the trough, will we usher in those big developments in technology? Entrepreneur, writer, investor, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky (Scott Belsky) gave his prediction. The original text was published on Medium with the title: 8 Themes For The Near Future Of Tech.
Key points:
“Decentralization” is spreading to unexpected places.
Eduployment era: Finding a business, receiving education, and getting a job (or starting a company) have been completely integrated.
Although some social apps may seem weird, they have become unique creative methods for people under the age of 16. These people regard those apps as a way of self-expression, and tolerance of transparency becomes the default.
With the rise of “personal channels” and communities as a service, talent will increasingly have their own audience.
More and more enterprise niche functions will become multiplayer games, supported by next-generation enterprise companies with consumerized product experiences. These companies will be highly specialized and supported by AI.
Creative tools will be deployed throughout the enterprise, just like the deployment of productivity tools in the past few decades.
New, disruptiveInterfaces will appear, and these interfaces will aggregate our lives and the underlying services used in our lives.
A new round of “Roaring Twenties” is right in front of us. The desire suppressed by the epidemic will be released in the form of self-expression in fashion, travel, and cultural distortion.
The downturn in 2020 has passed, and there are several important topics in the future that I am particularly excited about. As in previous years, the reason why I want to share my ideas is to use it as a way to connect more points, meet more founders, and solicit input for further development of these ideas. Not surprisingly, some of the companies I mentioned in these trends belong to my own portfolio, or are related to my work. However, I also challenged myself and shared some ideas that are still on the verge of breakthrough and are not part of the obvious trends and winners.
“Decentralization” is spreading to unexpected places.
Yes, Bitcoin and blockchain-based solutions are indeed all the rage in recent years. Side effects are ideas about how other aspects of work and life can be decentralized. For example, Ben Rubin’s/Talk is developing a decentralized means of team work (it turns out that the concept of “meeting” may be an outdated and wasteful relic of a centralized workplace). The Braintrust team is using the principles and technology of blockchain to develop a user-controlled talent network. Braintrust neither charges any fees nor extracts any commission from participants’ income, but instead benefits from tokens that become more valuable as the network grows. CashDrop’s team has also developed a method whereby anyone (from taco stalls to clothing designers) can open a store online through them, but without having to pay any fees and commissions required by traditional markets. Taking a step back and looking at it, the centralized owners of utility programs (such as markets, app stores, etc.) supported by the community, their traditional model is that everything that customers get is a piece of the pie (and the centralized owner of a large team The “boss” still insists on reviewing and permitting everything). The time has come to subvert this old model!
Era of integration of education and employment: finding a business, receiving education, getting a job (or starting a company) has been completelyIntegrated together.
Take Nana as an example. This company will provide users with training in electrical repairs (imagine unique dishwasher brands or the like) so that you can prepare for entering the job market and rely on those electrical appliance manufacturers The clues provided will help you find job opportunities locally. Or take a look at Main Street. It can train you as a painter, provide you with everything you need, and prepare you to become a successful company within 30 days. Its approach is basically equivalent to Become a franchise store. This new education and employment model (eduployment, Edu+ Empolyment) is different from the past. It does not require you to bear the expensive education costs and ultimately bear all the professional risks. Instead, it allows everyone involved to share the risk. The vertical integration of education and employment is coming. I think this trend will help solve the major systemic problems facing our economy on a large scale, and will also give birth to a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Although some social apps may seem weird, they have become unique creative methods for people under the age of 16. These people use those apps as a way of self-expression , Tolerance of transparency becomes the default.
Compared with the past few years, I found that more entrepreneurs are now starting to create more social apps, and they no longer make small-scale iterative innovations based on Facebook’s social graph or imitating existing products. Not anymore, they (finally) have original ideas. ItsMe is one of my favorites. It is relatively low-key and mysterious, but it is developing rapidly. ItsMe is now ranked 24th in the social network category of the app store. It allows you to connect with different people according to your mood, and allows you to create your own appearance, and you can communicate through text, voice, audio, etc. . There are other new social models in the pipeline that excite me. What do these next-generation social platforms have in common? They combine post-reading sharing with long-lasting reputation building. They tend to regard transparency as the default, freer interpretation of “privacy”, and fewer restrictions on creation. The purpose is to reward those who express the most self. Creative people. In the social category, I am especially excited about the rebirth of Gowalla as a geo-location social game. Public, the social network for public market investment, is also amazing. It can be said that the future of social is exciting, and contrary to popular belief, it will no longer be restricted by the dominant social networks today.
With the rise of “personal channels” and community as a service, talents increasingly have their own audience.
Gone are the days when super talented people needed to sign contracts with TV stations to get ahead. But there is advertising support, an algorithm-driven alternativeCases (such as YouTube and TikTok) still have the upper hand in terms of talent. The pursuit of “owning your own audience” will be a major trend in the next few years. In video, community, brand products (such as Borgo, which is still in the pre-release stage) and other fields, there will be the same equivalent as Substack (you use it to build your own mailing list and monetize) to build and manage Your audience and monetize it. Some early breakthroughs like OnlyFans and Patreon gave us a little bit of an understanding of what might happen. However, I especially like products such as Circle and Geneva, because these products can provide brands and individuals with mature community functions. If you are any type of content creator, you can now build a community to aggregate your audience and develop a variety of branch services to make your customer base happy (and profit from it). In this world, Instagram and YouTube type products are just marketing plans for the top groups of the funnel. The goal is purely to guide every potential customer you contact on other platforms to your private and managed channels. In the next few years, we will see a tremendous acceleration of this trend.
More and more corporate niche features will become multiplayer games, supported by next-generation corporate companies with consumerized product experiences. These companies will be highly specialized and supported by AI.
From procurement and security to financial planning and design, a specific team is responsible for the internal company, and functions that were once chimney-like are being transformed by SaaS tools. These tools are easy to use, take collaboration as a default, and include stakeholders across the company. Those who invest with me know my obsession with this field. From Globality for procurement, Sora for human resource communication, Meter for wifi and IT, to Welcome for new employee recruitment and induction training, there are many new programs, and this list is still going on. These types of products will fundamentally change the way large companies operate across functions, and they will also change the quality of life of employees. To facilitate this transition, WorkOS is developing enterprise-readiness as a service. The new company can sell products to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code, and its value proposition is within minutes.” Single sign-on (SSO)” into your app. Scarf is developing tools for open source developers to serve and profit from corporate customers. It can be seen that a lot of energy is bursting up and down in this field. But all this will bring a side effect: that is, the customer acquisition channels of enterprise SaaS will become more and more crowded and more and more outdated. This is a problem to be solved, but also an opportunity.
Creative tools will be deployed throughout the enterprise, just like the deployment of productivity tools in the past few decades.
Before the AI era, higher production efficiency was the best way to stand out at work. But now, as robots and algorithms replace those tedious and repetitive labor in the workplace, the benefits of human labor will be transferred to the unique skills and abilities of humans. The main one is: creativity. Come up with impressive ways to visualize data, conceive better ways to share stories with colleagues, attractive graphics to add interest to each demo, or make a powerful prototype that is worth opening One hundred meetings. In the next few decades, these abilities will define what it means to do well (in schools and society too), and everyone must be supported to achieve this goal. Obviously, as the chief product officer of the Adobe creative team, this is the main focus of my daily work. We see this dramatic expansion of the market can be divided into two types of roles: one is content-first creators, and the other is collaboration-first creators. The former hope to start with something, such as an image, video or graphic, and then remix or deconstruct it. The latter starts by bringing a group of people together and then using shared assets together. (For this reason, we have gradually turned Creative Cloud into a kind of “creative system”). Of course, this demand needs to be implemented using new tools on modern platforms (such as the Web). Adobe and a new application ecosystem are working hard to achieve this goal.
New, disruptive interfaces will appear, which will aggregate our lives and the underlying services used in our lives.
This is certainly not a new trend. Since 2014, I have been writing “Interface Layer” and “War of Becoming Default”. However, the explosive growth of SaaS products used in daily work and life (the enterprise trend mentioned above) is paving the way for a new problem/new opportunity: how can we put all these things together? Think about the digital space on which we live-the “home page” of our favorite app, the finder of the desktop machine, and the home screen of the mobile phone. We create various types of documents, files, folders and even teams in different places! We have a dedicated app for each of them, and there are too many places where we must manage permissions. All these different cloud documents and services have different architectures, and they can’t interact with each other yet—it’s just a mess. In response to this situation, some companies are rising, including Command E (a simple keyboard shortcut that can be used to open any document, contact, file or record in the cloud), and another company currently In stealth modeThe early stage company also excites me. There is no doubt that all these basic services and resources will be integrated, and whoever can integrate them will control the interface of our work, life and decision-making.
A new round of “Roaring Twenties” is right in front of us. The desire suppressed by the epidemic will be released in the form of self-expression in fashion, travel, and cultural distortion.
(Editor’s note: the roaring 20’s, the roaring 20’s, refers to the Western world and Western culture that took place during the 1920s. This is a period of sustained economic prosperity, with unique cultural advantages in the United States and Western Europe . In ten years, it has covered countless exciting events, so some people call this “the most colorful era in history”)
Our family has experienced this long epidemic for a long time with our neighbors, the co-founder and CEO of RentTheRunway, my dear friend Jenn Hyman and his family. Undoubtedly, for Jenn’s team, the stay-at-home order made them survive a very difficult year. But now, with the light at the end of the tunnel faintly visible, Jenn has a new vitality. She believes that after the epidemic, fashion will become more interesting and more advantageous than ever. I agree with this and imagine that after being vaccinated, we will let ourselves go through travel, fashion, parties, concerts, and meeting new friends, and re-enter the embrace of the world enthusiastically. (After all, the roaring 1920s of the last century also appeared after the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.) Our desire to fill the accumulated cultural vacuum will lead to some form of over-compensation and help us out of an epic future. Ten years. (Yes, I am a firm optimist).
Like all of you, I desire that we can overcome the challenges that 2020 will bring us. I hope that after experiencing the “big refactoring”, we can become more efficient and reclaim the 30% cognitive burden that was originally occupied by political fanaticism, psychological manipulation, and seemingly endless upsets. After regaining inner peace and ability, I hope all of us can chase our dreams equally and build the future!
Translator: boxi.