You Do The Dishes

Mary Meeker released her annual trends report for Kleiner Perkins last week. Overall, it is a fascinating read. The sheer number of facts along with the way they are presented is incredibly impressive. There are tons of interesting facts on internet penetration, mobile penetration, monetization on both platforms, and overall economic activity v. tech economic activity.

But the most impressive part to me, and the part that inspires me the most is the 60 slide section in the middle where Meeker discusses all of the industries that have been re-imagined in recent years. For anyone that says that our new technologies haven’t added anything to the world (see, Peter Thiel’s “We wanted flying cars and got 140 characters instead), just take a look at these slides. The slides are also a well-spring of inspiration to help you feel that the status quo doesn’t have to be the status quo.

Take a look at the slides (this is only a portion of the presentation, you can see the full deck here):

My personal favorite here for further “disruption” is the recruiting/hiring space. LinkedIn already does a great job, but I refuse to believe that a 1 page piece of paper with bullet points is the most appropriate way to judge someone’s credentials for employment. There’s an information deficit on both sides – essentially, a lack of data – which I’m hard pressed to believe can’t be filled in somehow with all the information we have available on the internet. People have started to manually solve this problem (“share the links to all your online presences” in lieu of a cover letter/resume), but I think there’s more that can be done.

And I’m also bullish on any company that can unearth and display data. Humans love numbers, they believe in them. And the sheer amount of data points that we are now able to track is tremendous. Figuring out which questions people want to answer is the key for a good data company. Figuring out how to track the metrics associated with those questions is the next challenge. The first question is largely limited by imagination itself. The barriers to actually tracking the metrics (the second question) are falling by the day.

I’m already looking forward to Meeker’s presentation next year.