Imagining our lives 10 years from now

The future can be friendly

I started doing future research for purely selfish reasons - to do a better job with my RRSP. For the last 5 years I’ve been averaging a respectable return but it was mostly tied to digital (Shopify, LinkedIn, Okta to name a few) because I understood digital.

But the big ideas in digital have been solved (Google -> Search, Facebook -> Networks, Amazon -> Procurement) and any new idea will use blueprints from digital innovation to solve non digital problems - such as AI driven vertical farming which uses digital to solve food problems. We will see other innovation where researchers are employing plastic eating bacteria. And the big problems around digital health as prevention and innovations to address climate change. All these will not be based on someone’s website.

To be able to spot trends there I would have to step out of my comfort zone of digital and be able to not only understand the wider landscape of possibilities but also which of those possibilities are good. In the end of the day stock market investment, more than anything in my opinion, relies on two things - the market value of the product and the quality of the leadership. People like Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick have egos that obscure the quality of the company and their product - I invested in Uber about a year after Travis’ departure because it turned out Uber is a great company but Travis’ personality made it hard to gauge from a distance whether Uber’s outlook was just hubris or reality.

As I started spreading my research I stepped into Futurism and Futures Thinking. I enrolled in the Futures Thinking specialization on Coursera which made me learn that there is a whole framework for thinking about the future, gauging trends, and evaluating trade offs.

This newsletter is the product of all of this. My goal is to dive into technological possibilities, remember the future, ideate the types of challenges we need to solve to get there, and see who is working on those solutions. So go ahead and subscribe below to join me on my journey.