A Look back at the 2010s
Starting the year with a commitment to writing.
I’ve missed writing. While I used to maintain a fairly active blog in the early days of my professional life, I completely gave up on it in this past decade. One of the things I’ve wanted to do is reconnect with the old blogging streak and resume writing on topics that interest me. That helps me stay centered on ‘Day Zero’ so that I can always keep learning (and thus the name).
In the spirit of the season, I wanted to take a tip from Fred Wilson and write down how I saw the big changes in the 2010s and what I expect from the 2020s. This is the first part of that post.
1/ SaaS and Cloud really came of age. Starting with the early days of Salesforce and the ‘No Software’ days, the ownership of Software has completely transformed in this decade. Outside of the large behemoths like Salesforce, AWS - there were a lot of companies that built fundamental building blocks of the new Software consumption world: companies like Okta, DataDog, and PagerDuty. Even in profitable niche areas, SaaS players like Veeva Systems created a highly capital-efficient scaled company. Tech has become the next Wall Street.
Over the last several years, the public cloud has emerged as the destination not just for startups but large Fortune 500 companies as well, although companies are still grappling in some cases on whats the right path to get onto this new business model and medium for consumption of computing.
2/ Technology became a global phenomenon. Backed with global development and global consumption of Software, it’s become easier than ever to build and distribute bits. In the 2000s there was anticipation, but the 2010s saw the delivery of this transformation of the India technology story from services to products. While there are many global success stories like Atlassian, I’ve been closer to the Indian ecosystem, and it’s great to see companies like FreshDesk and Druva reach scale and many others on the way. Not just SaaS, it’s great to see other business models like marketplaces getting adopted and innovated in other countries at an even faster pace. With the rise of machine learning and AI, the possibilities of what technology can deliver on a global scale have become boundless.
3/ We gave up a lot of control over our lives. A lot of people have written about the rise of the big tech, but if we think back to the 2000s, the Internet was still an optimistic place with a lot of promise. Today, many people are worried about what the internet has become: a set of largely closed moats owned by global monopolies and duopolies. As an advertiser, I saw first-hand, how much data and control we give up in this modern world of zip-zap-zoom, always-available cabs, smart home convenience, and omnipresent tracking pixels. While in the early days of Social Networks, it was exciting to write about your travels, now it has turned into a security risk. As large nation-states jump into more surveillance and walled gardens, the internet doesn’t sound as rosy stepping into the 2020s.
4/ Mobile Computing transformed us. At the start of the decade, iPhone was out, Android was still a baby and there were still the old dinosaurs around. However, as smartphones and cheap data has swept the masses, its become unimaginable to live without this great convenience. Video calling your loved ones, AR navigation, the phenomenon of selfies and the cornucopia of pocket computing mean humanity is looking for juice for their phones more often than food for themselves.
5/ Hype and hyperbole caused more bumpy rides in the popular imagination. With the advent of social media and always-on interaction, hype cycles have come and gone at a faster pace and played up by the media for the purposes of eyeballs. Of course, for instance, in tech there have been big ones like cryptocurrency, self-driving cars, virtual reality, Theranos, and $100 Bn VC funds - each of them captured popular imagination but delivered far less than promised. As several billions of people joined the internet, the spread of information became easier but the veracity took a backseat.
6/ Our politics and society has become more divisive. For the two countries, I know closely (U.S. and India), the internet and social media echo chamber has led to the re-inforcement of extreme beliefs. AI and recommendation systems keep pushing us deeper into visions of the future (e.g., the bubble is imminent) that may or may not come to pass. A lot of people learn about the world from private group chats and politically motivated advertising - the weaponization of memes is not something I would have imagined in the 2010s.
7/ Work has become more flexible than ever. While work and life have become more intertwined, the model of work has fundamentally changed. It’s incredible to see people “zoom”-ing into a meeting in a conference room next door so they can multi-task, and working from Estonia for a startup in Silicon Valley, setting their own hours in the gig economy or crazy bidding wars at both ends of the labor spectrum (high tech as well as hourly workers).
8/ The economic cycle has come full circle. We entered the 2010s with economic despondency in the West and promise in the East (esp in India which I saw closely). As we end the decade, the US has had the longest economic expansion on record, while developing economies such as China and India have slowed. While the turning of the wheel of fortune is inevitable, personally it’s been fascinating to see this up close.
I would love to hear from you, on what trends of the 2010s most transformed your life. My idea is to make this medium more interactive and would love to hear if there’s something I have missed, and what you look for in the 2020s.