Consumer Technology Is Alive and Well

The shift away from traditional subscriptions will quicken pace, driven by the proliferation of on-demand solutions across all areas of modern life. Categories like content consumption (Netflix, Spotify), Travel (Uber, Lime), and food delivery (Deliveroo, DoorDash) are creating an atmosphere on everything on our terms, at all times. These category-... See more

Whether this is a good thing is up for debate—we should, of course, still fix things like income inequality and climate change. (And we need policy changes to complement private sector solutions.) But consumer technologies will always adapt to changes in the people they’re being built to serve—and with the Gen Z and Millennial generations radically... See more

voice interfaces stand to reshape commerce in much the same way that the internet did 30 years ago. Existing supply chains, marketing strategies, and brand systems are optimized for the screen-based way that we currently interact with the web. Companies that are not thinking ahead to the next platform shift will inevitably fall behind.

Big tech platforms, e-commerce, and retail companies haven’t been acquiring direct-to-consumer brands, keeping a set of well-funded would-be buyers out of the equation.

And just as consumers shift to new mindsets, so too does industry. Over the past 20 years, nearly every industry has hired, restructured, and re-oriented itself around mobile workflows, products, or business lines. This transformation is as significant as any hardware or software innovation — and, in turn, creates the business case for subsequent i... See more

A decade ago, I was only a couple of years into my venture career. I believed that growth and progress were synonymous – in an industry where scale was the ultimate target, platforms that achieved it were glorified. A decade later, I have learned that success is more nuanced, and we have to take accountability for the outcomes we encourage. New dom... See more