Macromegas #41 - Food, Space, Google & The Innovation S-Curve
Food, Space, Google & The Innovation S-Curve
Hello Friends,
And happy Friday!
The adoption curve keeps getting steeper.
It took many decades for innovations such as electricity or the telephone to reach 80% adoption.
It took years for more recent products such as the VCR or the cellphone.
This week, we are looking into 3 perspective of this adoption curve.
All of them based on the fact that demand grows as cost decreases.
Cultivated meat: Out of the lab, into the frying pan 15min
How much does it cost to send stuff to space?
Richard Branson recently flew to space thanks to his Virgin Galactic space tourism company.
Jeff Bezos followed suit shortly after thanks to his Blue Origin space travel company.
This is happening because the cost of throwing things into space has been drastically decreasing in the past 6 decades.
Largely thanks to the increased time pressure created by Elon Musk through SpaceX and Starlink, this trend has even accelerated over the past few years.
The Future of Space, Part I: The Setup 8min
In the next decades, further innovation and scale might bring us to a point where sending payload to space will not be incredibly more expensive than airfreight.
How do you think it will disrupt the world as we know it?
More advanced readings:
The SpaceX Starship is a very big deal 24min
Artemis can succeed using Starship 10min (already shared in a previous newsletter)
Finally, a brilliant piece by Matt Levine shared in his “Money Stuff” email newsletter.
I love putting finishing with it and putting it in perspective with the above two disruptive innovations we just explored.
Sometimes, the most profitable innovation is absolutely boring.
Google and accidents 2min
Imagine being omniscient. You know everything that is happening in the world, as it happens, and you can synthesize all that massive data in useful ways that allow you to understand it at a deep level. How would you use all that knowledge and understanding to make money?
This is a financial column, and I assume that the most obvious answer is that you’d use your omniscience to buy financial assets that are going to go up. Investing seems like the most straightforward and lowest-effort way to transform information and understanding into money. Buy the stock of the biotech company that has found a miracle cancer cure but not announced it yet, buy the cryptocurrency that’s about to take off, whatever.
But maybe that’s wrong. Knowing and understanding everything that is happening might not give you perfect foresight into the future, and some strands of the efficient market hypothesis claim that you can’t beat the market even with good inside information. Maybe there are better ways to use your omniscience.
You could have a very very very stylized model of Google that says that it is in the business of knowing and understanding everything in the world — “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” it says — and that it is about as good as anyone at that business. It is not omniscient, but it is a reasonable approximation of omniscience. It does not know my most private thoughts, for instance, but it does know what I write in emails, which is pretty close.
I have always found it weird that the modern companies that approach closest to omniscience seem to be mainly in the business of ad sales? Like, it turns out that the most economically valuable human activity — the one that gives you the most leverage on omniscience — is tailoring advertisements to internet users? Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, had $182.5 billion of revenue last year, of which $146.9 billion came from Google advertising.
I can sort of see it? The thesis is something like “we know everything that happens and what everyone wants, so if you are selling something we can get it to the people who will buy it; we are in the business of organizing and intermediating commerce, and we take our commission in the form of ad revenue.” Amazon.com Inc., another big omniscience company, is not really in the ad business, but is in this business of organizing and channeling all of commerce. And “all of commerce” is a reasonable answer for “what is the most economically valuable place to apply omniscience?”
Still. Ads. Weird.
Anyway Google is now in the business of helping insurance companies sell insurance by predicting who will hurt themselves in buildings, I dunno:
Google is aiming to help small-business insurers more accurately measure occupancy of buildings where they are on the hook for slip-and-fall accidents and other risks.
The endeavor is part of a partnership between Google Cloud and Menlo Park, Calif.-based BlueZoo Inc. … Under the BlueZoo and Google Cloud partnership, small sensors in buildings listen for Wi-Fi probes spontaneously emitted by mobile phones. The sensors encrypt and compress these probes and forward them to analytics servers in the cloud, the companies said. BlueZoo arranges for the installation, often on ceilings.
It just feels so miscellaneous, you know? “We have built computers and sensors that understand physics and human nature so well that we can map out the future course of everyone’s life and predict to the minute when they will die, and we’re gonna use that godlike ability to calculate really accurate corporate property-and-casualty insurance premiums.” I mean, okay, whatever.
Thanks for reading, and have an innovative weekend,
V