Premonition

The fate of the urban environment itself, along with the restaurants and retail that it comprises, will depend upon government interventions at every scale. Without sufficient aid to individuals and small businesses (and even with that aid, to a lesser degree), widespread closures will create a void in commercial real estate demand. Urban brick-and... See more

We will probably see Zoom competitors emerge in the next 2 months that serve the JTBD of online collaboration and online socializing much better than Zoom does. I think there are lots of low-hanging fruit in this product space that I’d like to see more of.

Now that a few high profile DTC brands have been punctured on the public market and the economy is crashing, VC-driven DTC business model will likely go into its own recession. Without DTC, there is an opportunity for a variety of smaller, more sustainably funded players who do not seek hypergrowth.

We’ll also see the continued unbundling of Patreon into segment-specific interfaces with specialized features.

People will struggle to structure their time now that virtual activities carry more social weight than they did in the past. IRL hangouts have more tangible controls and barriers to entry that prevent people from engaging endlessly, and physical anchors that help form habits and routines. Without that, people are going to either burn out or quickly... See more

After all is said and done for our present pandemic, many thousands of people will be dead and the living will be burdened with a deep recession. Cheap solutions for end-of-life services will be sought and many will turn to the cheapest infrastructure they know of: the web. Streaming services and asynchronous rites will be used to pay the dead thei... See more

In a worst-case scenario, retail vacancies will be filled by more corporate chain retailers and even companies like Amazon, who have the cash to buy these distressed assets at a discount or assume their leases.

Activities and practices, narratives, and knowledge, which are equally vital components of culture, will instead take precedence. Memes, discourses, aesthetics, language, specialized knowledge and activities, all taking place online, will be the vehicles of lifestyle performance and participation. We’re already seeing plenty of new reading groups, ... See more

After the current display of consumption-as-resilience subsides, we’ll see less emphasis on artifacts — goods, clothes, and consumables.

Venture capital will seed companies that make efficient and novel use of people’s posthumous data. Just as lifestyle product development reached its zenith in the vast proliferation of colorfully branded DTC companies, we’ll soon see an outcropping of companies embedding value back into the death condition: Boutique hardware-accessory production fi... See more