Generational clustering
Over the weekend I listened to Gary Fox’s interview with Sean Blanchfield, who co-founded Demonware with me many years back and who is now building Jentic, an AI agent middleware platform. It’s good you should listen to it.
Before Demonware, Sean, Ronan Perceval and I all met in Trinity College Dublin where we started our first company together. That text-messaging startup subsequently led to Demonware (for Sean and I) and Phorest (which Ronan still runs) but also Jolt, Pagefair, SuperAwesome and Jentic. And that’s not including the various spin-outs from those companies.
Gary Fox has seemingly made it his mission to interview each of us about our collective and individual company-building journeys (Ronan, me). It’s a delightful set of materials which an AI tool can now probably generate something amusing with (reminder to self: must do this). It’s also a rather good ad for Trinity College and university education in general (go, meet your future co-founders, build companies!) and maybe somebody should do something about that?
Marketing suggestions aside though, if you listen to interviews with all three of us, you hear a consistent opinion about the advantage of clustering people with similar interests but disparate backgrounds.
Clusters are hardly a new concept. In fact Ireland’s economic development policy going back to 1992 was built on the idea (originally popularised by Michael Porter and proposed in the Culliton Report1). Thinking about this, I was struck that so many Gen Z founders I meet today tend to be anti-clustering in their behavior. This is driven at least by post-Covid remote working norms (doing more with less in-person) but increasingly the impact of AI-augmentation (doing more with less people).
I realise this sounds like an old person rant about ‘oh young people these days’ etc but it’s simply highlighting that generations change, whether we like it or not. Speaking of generational change, SuperAwesome just released an excellent report which I can only describe as if Mary Meeker, Ben Evans and Matthew Ball got together and built a presentation on kids’ internet behaviors (it does a wonderful job of illustrating some of the trends that Max and I are investing in). Curiously, you can also see some early signs of the Gen Z anti-clustering pattern appear in Gen Alpha audiences as well.
One piece of data from the report which was utterly fascinating (and may or may not be related to the previous trend) is the fragmentation of fandom. I referenced how the NBA are responding to this in our Gen Alpha trends for investors newsletter but it raises some pretty profound questions about current media business models…
This weekend I also listened to Brad Gerstner (Altimeter Capital) and Bill Gurley talk through their contradictory mix of AI optimism and public market pessimism. The future has never been so interesting yet so difficult to invest in with real conviction.
Which is widely referenced online but I can’t find the actual document itself.