Future of Tech: Tiktoking our future 🤖- Will France be the next Silicon Valley? 🇫🇷- Capital then what?

Today capital is no longer scarce. Attention is what has the most scarcity.

Oct 16, 2022

Episode #84. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼

This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again for you! Get your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech & culture. This week’s episode is focusing on the future in tech.

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#1. TikToking our future

I am sharing here my takeaways from this super interesting article from the inevitable Rex Woodbury. The article The Tiktokisation of everything published on Sept 28, 2022 could also be called AI is the Big One in tech today.

Mobile and cloud have driven the past 2 decades of innovation in tech.

Mobile first consumer services like Uber, Tinder or Instagram have created massive brands thanks to the invention of smartphones.
Cloud has been skyrocketing with the explosion of software as a service (SaaS). Data can now be stored at scale and everybody knows that data is now considered as the ‘new oil’. Companies like Slack, Airtable and Stripe are emerging while the percentage of corporate data stored in the cloud has doubled in seven years (30 to 60% from 2015 to 2022).

Amazon is now making $62bn revenues with AWS which is about a 10x growth over the same time period. Now the next big thing may not be Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality or Web3 as those tech are still in their infancy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is most likely the one big driver powering some of the biggest startup valuations in the 2020s. Just look at the autocomplete feature on Gmail or the recent breakthrough of text-to-image generative art, the power of AI is now becoming visible by consumers.
TikTok is probably the pioneer one of the best in class content curation algorithm to help produce personalized recommendations on its For You Page.

Today, 2 of the top3 most valuable startups are AI-first : #1 ByteDance (TikTok) #2 SpaceX #3 SHEIN.

« SHEIN’s explosion is nothing short of remarkable: SHEIN has grown over 100% every year for eight straight years (!), and its latest private market valuation makes it worth more than Zara and H&M combined. In June, SHEIN dethroned Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app in the iOS and Android app stores. »

Want to know more about SHEIN and the rest of this article from Rex Woodbury? Read the full article in Digital Native HERE.

A good overview of the impact of AI on creation can be seen in this tweeter thread from @daniel_eckler; the growing number of tools to help you write or create images and videos is just impressive already :

Daniel Eckler ✦ @daniel_eckler

AI is coming for creativity 💀 Learn these tools or get left behind 👇

#2. Will France be the next Silicon Valley?

“Why the French Renaissance is about to conquer the world” is a blog article that Marie Dollé x Thomas Owadenko x Dominique Delport published on Oct 9, 2022 in the newsletter In Bed with Social. Sharing my key learnings from this article I recommend you to read 👇

France now regroups several unicorns and high profile startups that can be categorized as GenZ-centric. Jellysmack and Sorare are globally famous in the creator economy. BeReal, a new social app brewed in France, had close to 15M downloads just in September 2022; it is now becoming the social app of the younger generation pretty much everywhere on the planet.

GenZers matter because they now form the biggest part of the world population with “almost 30 percent of the world’s population and expected to make up 27 percent of the workforce by 2025.”

What is so special about France for GenZers? The attractiveness of France over the past few years is getting an impact: France is now the top country in Europe for direct foreign investments. France is a leader in luxury and fashion industry with the KHOL giants in the sector (Kering-Hermes-l’Oreal-LVMH). There is a common denominator with the number #1 skill that 74% of GenZers want to master: creativity.

The French (modern) Renaissance may be happening now at the intersection of AI and Culture.” Remember the days when France was ruling creativity with Le Chateau de Versailles or La Tour Eiffel. We might be witnessing the rise of the GenZ startup nation 🇫🇷.

#3. Capital and then what?

Patrick Kervern shares his key business lessons from an interview with Albert Wenger, Ex co-founder of deli.cio.us Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures and author of the "World after Capital". The original is a podcast episode of Masters in Business from Bloomberg published on Sept 17, 2022 (CLICK HERE to access). You can also click on the book image below to get to the book.👇

1- In venture capital, you also learn a lot from the things that don’t work. You know, sometimes you learn a lot more from that than you learn from the ones that do succeed.

2- Our current iteration, what we call Thesis 3.0 is about broadening access to knowledge, capital and well-being by leveraging existing networks and protocols, and building trusted brands.

3- Today capital is no longer scarce. Attention is what has the most scarcity. And attention is time + intentionality.

4- Right now the big theme on which we need to direct our attention is the climate crisis.

5- The physics of this crisis are extraordinary. So because of all the CO2 we’ve put in the atmosphere, the amount of heat that we’re now trapping that used to radiate out into space, do you know how much heat it is? It is four Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs every second..

6- I’m not a degrowth person. I’m not suggesting we should get rid of markets. I’m just saying we should compress market-based activity from absorbing much of human attention to absorbing maybe 30% of human attention, and we should free the rest up to work on these incredibly important thing. Some of them are threats, and some of them are opportunities, right, opportunity to cure cancer, opportunity to create incredible wildlife habitats, restore those wildlife habitats, opportunity to travel to space. I mean, all these opportunities that we’re not paying attention to because they’re not — again, they’re not really market price based and can’t be market price based. There’s just no prices for them.

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