america used to own ideas about the future
The first time I went to Tokyo was to interview the founder of Pokémon. The hour we spent together schooled me; not just in what we talked about (matter + antimatter amongst other things) but in how we discussed it. Satoshi Tajiri took a subject some would call frivolous very seriously. You can’t invest in consumer technologies unless you take culture seriously. If you pushed me to define "culture", I'd call it the waters we swim in. Ideas, trends and habits that circulate at every scale from your local chat groups to global inspiration. Shared languages and behaviours we opt to believe or participate in; or opt out of. A few years ago, a friend sold their cyber company and got into playing English and Irish folk music. Really into. Through him, I learnt that wherever you are in the UK and in many places abroad, there are floating networks of folk people who pass on dates, times and locations of "sessions". Say, Tuesday at 7pm in a local pub. You turn up at 7pm with your melodeon to see a circle of people of all types and ages already playing their flutes and guitars and violins. Session rules are you literally sit down and drop into whatever they're playing, picking up what you can. It's generous and exuberant. It made me think of this one incredible scene in Sinners, which I think is my 2025 film of the year. Go see it!
No plot description does it justice but, on the surface, it's a Black Deep South gothic vampire film based on the urban myth that blues musician Robert Leroy Johnson met the devil at a Mississipi crossroads and sold his soul in return for musical success (which spoke to me; all the trades I have made in my life for the right to pursue what I want). Beneath that, it's about Black music, the Black experience of America and a thousand thrilling other themes; the impossibility of going "home" once you've left, the impermanent joy of the dancefloor, how the Irish became white. Watching it again on a small screen back from Singapore recently, I was struck by how many global cultural trends in the 20th century were dominated by America. Think;
My son's film of 2025 is Home Alone which is the perfect illustration of a core American cultural export in self-sovereignty ("got to defend my house by any means necessary"). Home Alone is almost forty years old. The Mad Men era of advertising is sixty. Sinners is set almost a hundred years ago. What are American ideas about the future that are new? Do they exist? In Singapore I began to think that the 21st century globally will be owned by ideas coming from Asian culture. Here I'm thinking of;
We're only twenty five years into the century so a lot to play out. Asia is huge and diverse but other common values I've come across there that made me wonder how they'd show up as exports; how central family units are, how important education is. And I wonder how perception lag - the gap between a real-world shift and when we notice it - works in both cases. In comparison to a thoughtful conversation about Pokémon, the first time I ever went to California I burnt my scalp working as a red carpet interviewer; California continues to kick my arse and yet I am besotted with the state. As a kid, I was fascinated by Paris syndrome. It's a phenomenon when Japanese tourists, raised to venerate French culture, have a psychotic break on their first trip due to the city not living up to their expectations. We perceive that America invents the future. Right now, in terms of market cap and companies, that still holds true. But there's a gap in big cultural ideas we should pay attention to. After all, Paris is more lovely than twenty years ago and empires both rise and fall. a) we know AI reshapes products, business models, moats and margins. The last few years in tech were so dominated by AI model/infra development, new devtools/enterprise adoption. Last month chatGPT announced 800M weekly active users. The surfaces of the internet fundamentally are shifting - I'd argue hardware too - and consumer incumbents across multiple verticals have been slow to reimagine themselves b) wide perception in European startup land that consumer is hard and unpopular. Great! Only the most missionary experienced founders opt in. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of. c) wide perception in European VC that consumer is hard and unpopular. As a pre-seed investor, this is the bet I am taking; that consumers are ready, that some founders who choose to build here are great quality and that follow-on investors flip to see the enormous value in this wide diverse space in 2026. Three investments made this autumn;
Lucky me. Wildly diverse things I wanted to tell you about:
I travelled very far this autumn and not only in miles. It's been fun! Don't call it a comeback / I've been here for years Sarah ✌️
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