Caught My Attention Ed. 10: 2025 Predictions, Why Data is the new Oil + more
Plus my two new arrivals - a baby and a new lead check!
I am officially back from maternity leave this week. I survived, with help. It takes a village as it turns out, and I have been grateful for my personal and professional team for the support me during the transition. Lucky James Cheatham = the baby’s name. Photo here. He’s already four months…
On top of all this, 2025 feels… insane? LA is tragically on fire, Trump is about to step into office, TikTok is going dark, and the world seems to be shifting below our feet. Censorship is eroding just like our beaches. Though one thing is clear: entire industries are emerging from the rubble of yesterday's excesses.
So what's next? Inspired by Fred Wilson's recent post where he calls his predictions more provocations, I gave my take on 2025 predictions recently on LinkedIn. I got the biggest reaction from something I call, “The Aquarius Economy” - where human creativity will become a core economic contribution as AI automates so much of our workload… and jobs. SEE LINK.
McKinsey projects AI could automate up to 30% of work hours by 2030. I believe as this shift happens more people will turn to artistic expression, craft, and improvisation as sources of income; “side hustles” that, with the help of e-commerce, social media, and new technologies that do not yet exist, will become primary income drivers.
I also asked some of the top Venture Capitalists working in Commerce their predictions as well for my first Forbes contribution of the year, published this week. LINK HERE.
Which do you agree with and which are you like "nah"? I want to know!
In other news that came across my desk,
TikTok will go dark: the US Supreme Court upheld the ban of TikTok. It’s messy, to say the least, as the NYT reports, but it continues the trend of countries levying access to citizens’ data as political weapon. India banned TikTok in 2020; Australia banned all social media for teens late last year.
What I find interesting is that this is all under the guise of national security, but as you know - I have argued for a long time there are economic reasons for banning TikTok and hoping a US company purchases it… to control the share of eyeballs that TikTok gets (which is at an all time high, by the way, with US users spending an average of 95 minutes per day on TikTok, while Instagram usage has declined 30%)… said another way, this is a strategic move to control our data… data that, as @dashofpaprika argues, is the new oil. SEE LINK.
Some companies are clapping back, though… Bluesky is supposedly raising at $700M to allow users control of their data to fight the tech oligarchs. I, for one, am not sticking around Twitter/X to see the ship sink…
Lastly, besides having a baby, I had one other big “arrival” while I was out on mat leave: I co-led the investment round of Hopscotch Labs, which builds things that exist at the intersection of "recently possible" and "newly ubiquitous.” Their first project is basically a mashup of OG Twitter, OG Foursquare, and Waze, with some AI fairy dust glueing it all together. Dennis Crowley, Founder of Foursquare, is the CEO of Hopscotch Labs and back at building things at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. The beta is so rad. LINK HERE.