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3 lessons from Root’s IPO pricing
Last night neo-insurance provider and former startup Root priced its IPO at $27 per share, $2 per share ahead of its $22 to $25 target price range.
According to Root, it sold 26,830,845 shares in its IPO, including 24,249,330 from the company itself. Its underwriting banks have the option to buy another 4,024,626 at the IPO price, less “underwriting discounts and commissions.” The remaining shares are being sold by existing shareholders.
At $27 per share, Root raised $654,731,910, but that figure will rise to $763,396,812 if its underwriters exercise their option in full, using the full $27 price for our calculation. Per its S-1 filings, both Dragoneer and Silver Lake will purchase $250 million of Root stock at the IPO price once the IPO has closed.
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Root will therefore raise north of $1 billion in its IPO, once all shares sold are counted. Doing some loose math, Root is worth around $6.8 billion at its IPO price, though Renaissance Capital, an IPO specialist, puts the figure at $7.1 billion on a fully diluted basis.
For the Midwest, Ohio-based Root’s IPO is a win. The company shows that it is possible to build high-growth technology companies worth billions of dollars far from coastal hubs. For the broader insurtech space, Root’s IPO is a win. The company follows Lemonade to the public markets, setting a strong valuation mark again for the neo-insurance startup market.
For similar companies like Clearcover, MetroMile and all startups that related to Root and Lemonade, it’s a good day. Let’s get into what we can learn from Root’s pricing.
Three lessons
Insurance multiples are hot. Key from Root’s IPO is the fact that we can now see insurance revenue being treated similarly to software revenue. How so? In multiples terms. Let me explain.
Root generated $245.4 million in revenue during the first and second quarters of 2020. That’s a run rate of around $491 million. At $7 billion, that’s a 14x revenue multiple. For an insurance provider with scant gross margins! Wild. Given Root’s weak-looking Q3 2020 revenues, that number isn’t going to fall anytime soon.
For companies that are not pure-play software outfits and want to go public, Root’s strong, above-range pricing makes it plain that there is investor demand for more than one type of revenue growth.
Investors are betting that Root’s history of growth will continue. In the first half of 2019, the company’s revenues were a mere 42% of what it pulled off during the same period in 2020. If the company can more than double again next year, then, hey, maybe all the numbers work. But to see public shareholders take such a growth-and-valuation flyer on an insurtech player is notable.
Kyle Nakatsuji, co-founder and CEO of Clearcover, another neo-insurance provider, explained to TechCrunch via email what he thinks is going on: “It’s clear that the market is aware of the massive opportunity for technology-enabled disruption in the category and it is rewarding those companies that focus on customer-oriented, digital innovation. The rapid growth of key players in the space is now proving this will play out and the winners will be consumers seeing lower prices and investors seeing better returns. ”
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Priori raises $6.3M to help large companies hire outside legal help
Priori Legal, a startup rethinking the way that large corporations hire outside counsel, has raised $6.3 million in Series A funding.
Founded by CEO Basha Rubin and CPO Mirra Levitt (who met while classmates at Yale Law School), Priori launched as a legal marketplace for small and medium businesses before finding its current model in 2016.
Rubin explained that although Fortune 500 companies have their own in-house legal teams, they still spend an average of $150 million a year on outside legal counsel. And finding that counsel can be an arduous process — a consumer goods company, for example, might need to hire lawyers in all 50 states.
So by creating a marketplace of vetted lawyers (it says it only accepts 10% of applicants), by running a bidding process for the work and by streamlining the billing and on-boarding process, the startup can save companies an average of 60% of the money they spend on outside counsel and reduce the search time by 80%.
“We don’t get involved in the substance of the lawyer-client relationship,” Levitt added. “We are not a law firm, we don’t do any of the legal work. Our innovation is focused entirely on the process of rapidly identifying the right talent and, once the matter is up and running, making billing seamless.”
There are currently more than 1,500 lawyers in the marketplace, representing all 50 states in the U.S., as well as 47 countries and 700 practice proficiencies. Levitt said that while the first lawyers to join the platform were usually independent or worked at small firms that might not previously had access to these kinds of clients, there are now larger firms signing up as well.
Priori founders Mirra Levitt and Basha Rubin
And Rubin said interest in Priori has only grown during the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn. Companies are trying to do “more with less,” and “part of our value proposition is fundamentally cost savings.” For example, she noted that client spending on the platform has increased 200% in the last year.
“We began to see so much inbound demand that we would log onto Slack at 11pm and the entire team would be working,” she said. “We have a truly extraordinary team, but a) that’s not sustainable from a human perspective, and b) we saw an opportunity to really grow dramatically if we could throw resources at it.”
The Series A comes from Hearst Corporation (also a Priori customer), Great Oaks Venture Capital, Jambhala, Tim Steinert (former general counsel of Alibaba Group), Mindset Ventures, Bridge Venture Fund and Orrick’s Legal Technology Fund.
In addition to growing the team, Rubin said that the new funding will allow Priori to expand its network of lawyers, especially internationally.
“From a product perspective, we’re really building out our use of data throughout the platform,” Levitt said, adding that the company plans to use machine learning to improve attorney vetting, matchmaking, bidding, project scoping and more.
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Shotcall picks up $2.2 million to let fans game with their favorite streamers
The pandemic has resulted in a growth spurt for gaming, an industry that was already growing on the backs of esports and Twitch streaming. So it makes sense that startups big and small are flocking to the industry to find their own place in the ecosystem.
One such company is Shotcall, founded by Thomas Gentle, Gordon Li and Riley Auten, which aims to increase engagement for streamers by giving their fans what they really want: a chance to play alongside their favorite content creator.
The company today announced the close of a $2.2 million seed round led by Initial Capital, New Stack and Lerer Hippeau .
As it stands now, viewers who tune in to a Twitch stream only have so many ways of interacting with their favorite streamer, whether it’s gifting subscriptions to the channel or cheering with bits, Twitch’s virtual currency. Streamers with a smaller audience are often pretty engaged with their chat, but as they grow their audiences, it’s harder for viewers to stand out in the crowd.
And even if you do manage to stand out and get a shout-out, that’s all it is. The streamer says thanks and reads your message and that’s that. Some streamers host games with their subscribers, but organizing them can be tedious at best, and monetizing them is nearly impossible.
With Shotcall, streamers can engage with their fans in a way that not only gives that fan a chance to really connect with them, but that also creates more high-quality, shareable content.
The platform allows streamers to set up a tournament, coaching session, Q&A, charity event or whatever type of event they’d like, and fans can pay to get in on the action. Shotcall organizes these community events, giving the streamer control over the length of each gaming session, how much they’d like to charge to participate and the rules of engagement (whether fans can use mics, curse on stream, etc.).
“Fans are at the center of the entire global value chain in the gaming world,” said Gentle. “They dictate what games are bought and which content creators rise and fall out of favor. They pay the bills for everything. And yet their interactions are weak. And if you take a look at the data, they have a high desire and a high willingness to pay more if you were to give them what they truly want. And that is engagement.”
The revenue split between hosts and Shotcall depends on the type of event, whether that streamer is a partner, etc., but the most Shotcall will ever take is 25%.
The company is in the process of integrating directly with Twitch and Discord (with bots) to make the process even more seamless.
Thus far, Shotcall has amassed around 350 active hosts and more than 4,500 fans have been active on the platform in the past two months.
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LA-based MarketerHire upgrades its service matching remote marketers with companies
MarketerHire, a Los Angeles-based startup backed by a slew of executives from some of the city’s hottest startups, launched its new service matching freelance marketing experts with open jobs listed on its platform.
“Today’s startup economy depends on the expertise of industry specialists as much or more than full-time generalists,” said Nick Green, co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, a MarketerHire customer and investor, in a statement. “For a lot of high-growth companies, it no longer makes sense to build a big in-house team; better to leverage the best specialists to get the job done, and MarketerHire enables that talent to be easily found and matched — and all remote.”
To date, the company has raised $4 million in financing from executives like Green and other undisclosed C-suite executives from startups like Zillow, FabFitFun, Seamless and Notion .
The company provides a pre-vetted pool of marketing experts and matches those professionals with open positions posted by brands and agencies based on the qualifications, education, skills and project details they submit. Brands can typically fill their open positions in as little as 48 hours, the company said.
The new upgrade to the company’s service provides brands with a faster matching service based on machine learning algorithms designed to parse available jobs over different attributes across specific functions.
“The term ‘marketing’ has morphed to broadly encompass a growing list of niche specialties and platform-specific skills — from SEO and SMS to Amazon and TikTok,” said investor Andy Appelbaum, managing partner of RiverPark Ventures and co-founder of Seamless, in a statement. “As the algorithms, best practices, and expertise required for effective digital marketing rapidly evolve, organizations need instant access to expert talent to fill gaps in their internal teams.”
The company already counts a customer base that includes Allbirds, Netflix, PUMA and Quip, and it pulls its marketing professionals from a roster of former marketing executives from companies like Netflix, Sephora, Rothy’s, Facebook, Uber and Glossie. And the industry it’s tackling accounts for some $248.9 billion in business spending.
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That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate, a new startup built by Dropbox alums
VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a mainstay of corporate network security (and also consumers trying to stream Netflix while pretending to be from other countries). VPNs create an encrypted channel between your device (a laptop or a smartphone) and a company’s servers. All of your internet traffic gets routed through the company’s IT infrastructure, and it’s almost as if you are physically located inside your company’s offices.
Despite its ubiquity though, there are significant flaws with a VPN’s architecture. Corporate networks and VPNs were designed assuming that most workers would be physically located in an office most of the time, and the exceptional device would use a VPN. As the pandemic has made abundantly clear, fewer and fewer people work in a physical office with a desktop computer attached to ethernet. That means the vast majority of devices are now outside the corporate perimeter.
Worse, VPNs can have massive performance problems. By routing all traffic through one destination, VPNs not only add latency to your internet experience, they also transmit all of your non-work traffic through your corporate servers as well. From a security perspective, VPNs also assume that once a device joins, it’s reasonably safe and secure. VPNs don’t actively check network requests to make sure that every device is only accessing the resources that it should.
Twingate is fighting directly to defeat VPNs in the workplace with an entirely new architecture that assumes zero trust, works as a mesh and can segregate work and non-work internet traffic to protect both companies and employees. In short, it may dramatically improve the way hundreds of millions of people work globally.
It’s a bold vision from an ambitious trio of founders. CEO Tony Huie spent five years at Dropbox, heading up international and new market expansion in his final role at the file-sharing juggernaut. He’s most recently been a partner at venture capital firm SignalFire . Chief Product Office Alex Marshall was a product manager at Dropbox before leading product at lab management program Quartzy. Finally, CTO Lior Rozner was most recently at Rakuten, and before that Microsoft.
Twingate founders Alex Marshall, Tony Huie and Lior Rozner. Photo via Twingate.
The startup was founded in 2019, and is announcing today the public launch of its product, as well as its Series A funding of $17 million from WndrCo, 8VC, SignalFire and Green Bay Ventures. Dropbox’s two founders, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, also invested.
The idea for Twingate came from Huie’s experience at Dropbox, where he watched its adoption in the enterprise and saw firsthand how collaboration was changing with the rise of the cloud. “While I was there, I was still just fascinated by this notion of the changing nature of work and how organizations are going to get effectively re-architected for this new reality,” Huie said. He iterated on a variety of projects at SignalFire, eventually settling on improving corporate networks.
So what does Twingate ultimately do? For corporate IT professionals, it allows them to connect an employee’s device into the corporate network much more flexibly than a VPN. For instance, individual services or applications on a device could be set up to securely connect with different servers or data centers. So your Slack application can connect directly to Slack, your JIRA site can connect directly to JIRA’s servers, all without the typical round-trip to a central hub that a VPN requires.
That flexibility offers two main benefits. First, internet performance should be faster, since traffic is going directly where it needs to rather than bouncing through several relays between an end-user device and the server. Twingate also says that it offers “congestion” technology that can adapt its routing to changing internet conditions to actively increase performance.
More importantly, Twingate allows corporate IT staff to carefully calibrate security policies at the network layer to ensure that individual network requests make sense in context. For instance, if you are a salesperson in the field and suddenly start trying to access your company’s code server, Twingate can identify that request as highly unusual and outright block it.
“It takes this notion of edge computing and distributed computing [and] we’ve basically taken those concepts and we’ve built that into the software we run on our users’ devices,” Huie explained.
All of that customization and flexibility should be a huge win for IT staff, who get more granular controls to increase performance and safety, while also making the experience better for employees, particularly in a remote world where people in, say, Montana might be very far from an East Coast VPN server.
Twingate is designed to be easy to onboard new customers according to Huie, although that is almost certainly dependent on the diversity of end users within the corporate network and the number of services to which each user has access. Twingate integrates with popular single sign-on providers.
“Our fundamental thesis is that you have to balance usability, both for end users and admins, with bulletproof technology and security,” Huie said. With $17 million in the bank and a newly debuted product, the future is bright (and not for VPNs).
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Kandji hauls in $21M Series A as Apple device management flourishes during pandemic
Kandji, a mobile device management (MDM) startup, launched last October. That means it was trying to build the early-stage company just as the pandemic hit earlier this year. But a company that helps manage devices remotely has been in demand in this environment, and today it announced a $21 million Series A.
Greycroft led the round, with participation from new investors Okta Ventures and B Capital Group, and existing investor First Round Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $28.4 million, according to the company.
What Kandji is building is a sophisticated zero-touch device management solution to help larger companies manage their fleet of Apple devices, including keeping them in compliance with a particular set of rules. As CEO and co-founder Adam Pettit told TechCrunch at the time of his seed investment last year:
We’re the only product that has almost 200 of these one-click policy frameworks we call parameters. So an organization can go in and browse by compliance framework, or we have pre-built templates for companies that don’t necessarily have a specific compliance mandate in mind.
Monty Gray, SVP of corporate development at Okta, says Okta Ventures is investing because it sees this approach as a valuable extension of the company’s mission.
“Kandji’s device management streamlines the most common and complex tasks for Apple IT administrators and enables distributed workforces to get up and running quickly and securely,” he said in a statement.
It seems to be working. Since the company’s launch last year it reports it has gained hundreds of new paying customers and grown from 10 employees at launch to 40 today. Pettit says that he has plans to triple that number in the next 12 months. As he builds the company, he says finding and hiring a diverse pool of candidates is an important goal.
“There are ways to extend out into different candidate pools so that you’re not just looking at the same old candidates that you normally would. There are certain ways to reduce bias in the hiring process. So again, I think we look at this as absolutely critical, and we’re excited to build a really diverse company over the next several years,” he said.
Image Credits: Kandji
He notes that the investment will not only enable him to build the employee base, but also expand the product too, and in the past year, it has already taken it from basic MDM into compliance, and there are new features coming as they continue to grow the product.
“If someone saw our product a year ago, it’s a very different product today, and it’s allowed us to move up market into the enterprise, which has been very exciting for us,” he said.
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Fab founder Jason Goldberg is back with Moxie, a new live-streaming fitness marketplace
Amid a pandemic that has closed down fitness centers worldwide, a spate of companies has muscled their way into the booming at-home fitness market.
In just the last two weeks, three-year Future, which promises at-home customers access to elite training, closed on $24 million in Series B funding; and Playbook, a nearly five-year-old fitness platform that helps personal trainers stream their content (and charge a monthly fee for it), raised $9.3 million in Series A funding.
Now, serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg — who has founded a number of venture-backed startups — is taking the wraps off another live-streaming platform and marketplace. Called Moxie, it connects fitness instructors of all stripes with existing and new students, then enables them to stream classes on a subscription basis — and to keep 85 percent of the revenue for themselves.
Of course, according to Goldberg, it’s all far more sophisticated than that. Indeed, Moxie’s 45 employees were working on a very different company until COVID-19 took hold in Europe and the U.S., following its initial outbreak in China. (Moxie is based in Berlin.) After some soul-searching, the team pivoted completely to fitness, and they’ve been testing and tweaking Moxie ever since.
It’s a compelling proposition, even while other startup founders are also chasing after it. While a year ago, fitness instructors spent 90 percent of their time in studio settings, they now spend 90 percent of their time teaching online, which means they need really solid tools to do their jobs well.
While earlier in the pandemic, many of them turned to Zoom, emailing students links and taking payments via Venmo, it was a janky experience for everyone involved.
With Moxie, an instructor, says Goldberg, can live stream classes, as well as record them; access playlists that Moxie has already licensed through third parties (and that Moxie can smartly dampen sound while an instructor is talking to students); and access internal customer relationship management tools that make it easy to track and communicate with students, along with automatically collect payment from them.
The benefits are resonating, according to Goldberg. He says that largely by finding and pitching instructors on Instagram, Moxie has already attracted more than 2,000 instructors of yoga, pilates, and barre-centered classes among others, and that they are now teaching more than 6,500 classes for a range of prices that the instructors can set themselves.
Classes on average range in price from $5 to $10. Goldberg says that over the last four weeks, customers have been spending an average of $60 on the platform per month. (Moxie uses Stripe for payments and AWS to store and stream video.)
Investors like Howard Morgan, Geoff Prentice, Allen Morgan who’ve backed Goldberg time and again like the idea, clearly. Along with Tencent, they’ve provided Moxie with $2.1 million in seed funding, and Goldberg suggests he’ll be ready for more capital soon.
Whether new investors will need to be convinced that Moxie is “the one,” given Goldberg’s history, remains to be seen.
As longtime readers might know, Goldberg launched his career as a startup founder with Jobster, a recruiting platform that raised about $50 million before laying off half its staff and selling for undisclosed terms to a site called Recruiting.com.
Goldberg then founded a news aggregation service Social Median, which was was later acquired by a German LinkedIn competitor called XING for undisclosed terms; Fabulis, a social network for the LGBT community that pivoted to become a daily-deals site (and later shut down after spending $1 million in seed funding); and most famously Fab .com, a design-focused e-commerce site that was valued at $900 million by its investors at one point, but later went out of business.
In late 2016, Goldberg launched a messaging app called Pepo that enabled anyone to create and join live messaging communities and that raised around $3 million from investors, including Tencent. Indeed, it was a newer iteration of Pepo that Goldberg and his team decided to abandon in March for Moxie.
Certainly, his various endeavors underscore that Goldberg has no shortage of — dare we say it — moxie. To many investors, that’s the most crucial ingredient in growing a nascent company.
In any case, he doesn’t seem worried about fitness platform’s prospects. “We have no shortage of people who want to invest in Moxie,” he told us during a call yesterday.
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Launch next-level networking with CrunchMatch at our TC Sessions: Space event
TC Sessions: Space 2020, our first space technology event, launches December 16-17, and you won’t want to miss our virtual conference focused on this fast-emerging startup category. You’ll hear from the space industry’s top movers, shakers and decision makers, including Space Command’s General John W. Raymond, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Tess Hatch of Bessemer Venture Partners — with plenty more to come.
TC Sessions: Space offers an unparalleled networking opportunity to meet the most important people in the space industry, across public, private and defense. You’ll be able to set up meetings with hundreds of engineers, founders, students, investors, executives and military and government officials from around the world. CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered platform, connects you with the people who share your specific business interests and goals. It makes networking easier, efficient and more productive.
After you register for TC Sessions: Space 2020, you’ll get invited to the CrunchMatch platform where you’ll answer a few quick questions about who you want to meet. Then CrunchMatch gets to work to find and recommend people who align with your goals. You can send invites and schedule 1:1 video calls. You also have the option to search manually. Connect with investors, founders, engineers, R&D teams, manufacturers, students, potential customers or employees. CrunchMatch makes it faster and easier.
Pro Tip: Buy your pass before early-bird pricing ends on November 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). We offer discount passes for students, government, military and nonprofits, and current Extra Crunch subscribers receive a 20% discount on passes.
This may be our first space conference, but it’s not our first rodeo. Read what attendees from other TC Sessions say about networking with CrunchMatch:
“The networking at TC Sessions is terrific. Our company’s building momentum in the U.S. market, and the opportunity to meet and talk with all the players is very important. The CrunchMatch platform made it easy to connect.”— Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.
“The CrunchMatch is basically speed-dating for techies, and it was very helpful. I scheduled at least 10 short, precise meetings. I learned about startups in stealth mode, what big corporations were up to — things not yet picked up by the press. It was great, and I followed up on three or four of those connections.” — Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP.
Get ready for a deep dive on topics like 3D-printed rockets, launch services, orbital operations, ground station networks and beyond. Learn about innovative tech, discover emerging trends and potential opportunities.
TC Sessions: Space 2020 lifts off December 16-17. Buy your pass today and start connecting with the space tech community, learn from and partner with the people determined to push deeper into the cosmos.
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Let’s move beyond 2020 and start thinking about the 2020s
Seasonality is critical for the media. End-of-year wrap-ups, best books for the summer, things to do this weekend — they’re all methods to note not only the passage of time, but also to begin to set the tone for what is about to come.
Everyone covered the end of the 2010s with aplomb, a decade that, at least in tech, was filled with huge milestones, including some of the largest startup IPOs of all time and also some of the worst lows we’ve ever seen — frauds and product snafus that were larger and grander than ever before.
Those retrospectives though were supposed to be complemented with the prospectives — what’s about to happen in the 2020s? What’s next? Where is progress and innovation going to come from this decade? We barely got this decade going of course before the pandemic hit, the U.S. elections got into full swing, and it has been non-stop debates about school openings, stump speeches, and whether a vaccine will arrive soon, shortly, distantly, or I guess never at all.
Our collective long-term vision has been terrorized by the short-term news that constantly rolls through our feeds. It’s time to change that.
Regardless of the outcome next week (or maybe next month?) in the U.S. or the final vaccine timeline for COVID-19, we still need to define what this next decade is about, particularly in technology, where the list of issues is widening and the number of sectors that have the potential for innovation expands. We need to think beyond the mundane daily operational challenges of startups and fundraises and consider the values we want to empower and inform in the years ahead.
Many of these questions go beyond mere “apps” to encompass areas of law, culture, societies, and ultimately, what we want to leave for the next generations coming behind all of us.
Over on EC, I’ve written a deep dive into five broad “clusters” of change that have the potential to transform our world in the 2020s, in areas like “wellness,” “climate,” “data society,” “creativity,” and “fundamentals” that each hold so many startups ideas that I truly am excited about what’s about to be unleashed this decade.
Yet, whether you like my amorphous groupings or not, I encourage everyone in the startup ecosystem to begin thinking about how to connect the dots between different startups, different sectors, and how our society is organized. The next generation of startup ideas are not going to come from the proverbial whiteboard and some Swift engineering in Xcode. They’re going to come from much more methodical and deeper introspection about what our society and all of us need going forward.
The 2010s were all about executing on the dreams of mobile, cloud, and basic data. Those ideas had historical antecedents going back in some cases decades or more (Vannevar Bush’s description of the internet dates to the 1940s, for instance). But for the first time, we had the infrastructure and the users to actually build these products and make them useful. It was quite possibly the most extensive greenfield opportunity in the history of technology.
Yet, that greenfield is increasingly fallow. Business has cycles and seasonality as much as media reporting does. The easy stuff has been done. Building an app to text people has been done by dozens before. There are a multitude of analytics packages, and payroll providers, and credit card issuers, and more. What’s required this decade is to start to encroach on the harder questions, topics like how we build a better society, make people more empowered to do deep and creative work, and how we can build a more resilient and sustainable planet for all.
None of these topics have pure point solutions — but that is what is going to make this coming decade so damn interesting. It’s going to take intense collaboration, multiple inventions and products, as well as legal and cultural changes, to realize these next improvements. If you have grown sick (as I have) of the latest apps and SaaS products du jour, this decade is going to be an amazing one to experience and build.
It’s a new season to lift our heads up a little and look around. The world, yes, is filled with problems — terrible, horrible, and stultifying problems that can at times feel all but insurmountable. But human ingenuity has always found a way, and we have never had such an extensive toolbox to confront all of them simultaneously. If the 2010s were all about humans learning technology, the 2020s is all about technology learning about humans.
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5 startup theses that will transform the 2020s
I wrote a call to action for the tech community to dive deeper into the future of innovation this coming decade. Where are some of the hot spots going to come from though? Below, I have assembled a very loose set of five clusters broadly categorized into “wellness,” “climate,” “data society,” “creativity,” and “fundamentals” that offer some scaffolding for understanding what’s about to come this decade and how and any entrepreneur — really, any citizen — can start to build progress.
Take these ideas as inspirational — they aren’t limits, nor should the borders of these categories be seen as anything but liminal. I know in the daily cavalcade of news, it can be hard to feel inspired by the future. But do be! There is so much more coming this decade, that we may look back at the 2010s as the dark ages of innovation.
“Wellness”
Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
First, there is a cluster around “wellness.” That sometimes gets elided to just “mental health” and reduced to a prescription bottle, but this area really encompasses so much more than that. How do we build humanistic societies with strong social fabrics that enliven, enrich, and build meaning for our lives?
Yes, we’ve seen strong demand for wellness apps like Calm and Headspace. Exercise hardware like Peloton, Mirror and others along with platforms particularly around group classes have been a huge mainstay during this pandemic era. Mental health treatment itself is getting a makeover as startups reinvigorate the in-person therapist and psychiatrist visit as well as think about new models of delivering mental health services virtually. Even LSD is starting to make headways as a potentially useful tool, and psychedelics are going to be an interesting area to watch in the coming years.
All those areas still are ripe for innovation, yet, how do we go deeper and start to address the root causes of anguish and despair?
Take work, for instance. How do we make workers feel more secure and meaningful in a remote world where gig work makes up an increasing fraction of all employment? The precariousness of labor has a direct effect on wellness, and it’s going to take a much greater leap than a reclassification battle like in California this election cycle to make work “work” for all people. What can we do around stability of pay whether from employment or maybe programs like universal basic income to give people a sense of ownership over their destinies?
How do we start to create the bonds of neighborhoods and communities that hold people together and offer solace in times of despair? Part of this is improving the average town and making it more human-centric (that’s like 20 startups right there), but it also includes constructing more vibrant and expressive virtual worlds where we can find online neighborhoods that are safer than the dumpster fires we find on the web today.
Then there’s the health system in general. While America deservedly receives huge criticism for its overpriced and under-insured system, health systems worldwide face incredible pressures to improve efficiency. How do we make care better, more personalized, and more open? How do we reduce costs while ensuring that care is accurate and delivered expeditiously? There is huge work to be done to make health a key component.
To increase wellness for individuals, we need to increase wellness for our societies, building systems that are designed for the humans that inhabit them. Flexibility with security, engagement with individuality, expression with support. Our existing systems are already antiquated — and we haven’t come up with anything better.
This cluster is about asking “How does the world make us feel?”
“Climate”
Image Credits: Jacobs Stock Photography (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The second cluster has to do broadly with the Earth, climate, crisis, and resilience. Climate change is real and not going away, and quite literally billions of people are going to feel its effects in the coming decades. Rising tides, massive hurricanes, power outages, wildfires, droughts and more are going to become part of our daily news vernacular.
Resiliency is not something that any one technology can offer, but innovation has huge potential to allow more of our systems to adapt to the changing nature of our world today.
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