#10: The Opportunities of the New Internet

We come to final essay in this series which talks about the actionable business and financial opportunities that this new internet provides. This is very timely because the current internet had provided the best career opportunities for millennials over the last two decades but is failing to do for Gen Z. This is reflected in big tech companies not hiring junior roles, campus hiring is at 20-year record low, and the steep decline in software funding. The new generation desperately needs a new career path that not only provides them the economic prosperity but also aligns with their values.

The new internet has the potential to be a much bigger economic force than the current internet because it has money and property rights built-in. The difference between the current internet and the new internet front the economic point of view is similar to the difference between communism versus capitalism. Let’s dive deeper into this idea.

In the current internet, content creators have no property rights and all of the content belongs to the big tech platforms who opaquely decide to give no/low fees to these creators. This is very similar to the structure of communism where the state owned all the resources. The new internet gives property rights of content and the follower graph to the creators meaning they can take their audience and content to their desired platform or make a platform of their own. This would incentivize production of much higher quality content since creators will get paid a lot more in the new internet.

This result in monetization potential and hence quality of the new internet is similar to the products and economy seen in capitalist countries versus communist countries. We’ve seen in the physical world that similar economies like East/West Germany or countries like India moving from socialist to capitalist regimes has resulted in 10X the economic size in 30 years.

So we believe the new internet has the potential to be O(10)X in economic size than the current internet which would likely be the biggest economic opportunity for GenZ.

Now, a lot of that value be will be captured by startups building all the infrastructure and applications on top of the new internet. But instead of 4-5 companies building it all, the decentralized nature of the new internet will allow thousands of companies to build them. This will lead to less billionaire/ unicorn startups but a lot more millionaire profitable startups which aligns well with the ambition of the next generation who prioritize lifestyle and values instead of just chasing money. Geographically too we’ll see a lot more dispersion than just Silicon Valley because the blockchain will have to be curated to better fit the content needs of local geographies.

While software startups do stand to gain a lot from the new internet, the most rewarded roles of the new internet would be creators and curators that we described in the last essay. The reason is simple the new internet allows direct relationships between users and content owners and less intermediation by software companies. The switching cost from one app to another is also low allowing less monopoly power to the software.

There is a general business archetype that these roles would follow that can be applied across thousands of business verticals. The general archetype can be visualized below:

It all starts with content, whether created or curated. By content we don’t mean just anything that catches eyeballs. Our notion of content is more similar to Naval Ravikant’s definition of specific knowledge. It is an idea graph or philosophy that is unique and coherent. And it has been explained in enough detail and in enough forms that it is able to attract people who resonate with that philosophy. The community attracted can then use money built into the new internet to fund all sorts of products related to that philosophy. These communities will themselves figure out the revenue sharing among the participants fit for their needs.

For example there can be a Vegan community versus Keto community. Both of them will attract audiences with their philosophies about food and then build products (recipes, restaurants, ingredients, etc for their members.

This basic business model can also be thought of as cultural venture capital. Just as big venture capital companies attracted founders, funded capital and made products for the whole world, this new internet allows to do the same for various social and cultural trends. Investing in these social and cultural trends is only possible if you are deeply embedded in that culture’s philosophy as a user and hence crowdfunding capital from the user both helps fund these new cultures and also reward members to propagate them.

The new internet thus allows cultural innovation at an unprecedented scale that fosters a sense of belonging in its community members. In the process, this new internet creates innately more human career opportunities for the next generation and distributed financial upside. In the age of AI, this new internet builds on the inherent human advantage of human consciousness, creativity and connection and allows us to regain our attention, our intellectual property, our communities and our sense of ourselves.