Welcome to the Zoomer Age
To understand the future, we need to understand Zoomers. Zoomers are tech- savvy but using Zoom does not make you a Zoomer. The oldest Zoomers are turning 25 in 2020 while the youngest Zoomers are in elementary school. Welcome to their future, the Zoomer Age.
In addition to seeing a lot of my Zoomer kids at home during the past 3 months while their physical schools have been closed, I get to interact regularly with Zoomers through my work at Fresco Capital and across our portfolio companies. I spend some time mentoring Zoomers, and in return they spend some time mentoring me.
Here is what I’ve learned.
👩🎓 x ☁️ x 🤑 x ♻️ x 😷 = 🌟
This equation describes the impact of Zoomers on the future through five key areas of society: learning, working, money, sustainability, and wellness.
First, let’s review why Zoomers are important.
As of 2020, Zoomers are the largest generation in the world. This happened somewhat quietly because for many years they were being lumped together with Millennials, but these are two separate generations. A 20 year old in 2020 is definitely a Zoomer.
2020 has also become the breaking point globally for systems across societies and economies from the shock of COVID-19. We are not living in a new normal. We are living in a new abnormal.
This year will likely be the first time since 1998 with a global increase in poverty, and that is just one of the many indicators which is going in the wrong direction. The challenges are massive. If we want to come up with forward looking solutions, Zoomers must be a key part of the process.
By 2040, the oldest Zoomers will be 45 and the youngest will be in the early days of their working lives. In 2020, most Zoomers are still in some sort of school, so it makes sense to start with their impact on the future of learning.
Learning 👩🎓
The largest Zoomer school in the world is YouTube (take a look here, here, here, here, and here). The largest Zoomer country in the world is India. So it should not be surprising that Google India has launched YouTube Learning Destination in April of 2020, even with bandwidth constraints which are still a bottleneck for video consumption.
“The YouTube Learning Destination is accessible on mobile as well as desktop…whether you’re studying for a test, want to learn a new skill, or are just curious about the world.” — Google India Blog
YouTube is huge with Zoomers, but what does that tell us about the future of learning?
My Zoomer kids have been staying at home from school because of COVID-19 for more than 3 months now, and it’s been fascinating to observe them in action. Here is what they have actually been doing:
- Critical thinking: self-directed learning for a project where they typically have to gather information (both online and offline), and/or solve problems presented by a teacher.
- Creating: science experiments, food art projects, and slide decks are some of the typical creator activities that they have been doing.
- Communicating: persuasive writing, video filming/editing, Zoom (and other real-time video tools), chat apps, email, and the list goes on. All of them include some kind of reading, writing, speaking, or listening.
- Collaborating: this varies by project and combines aspects of critical thinking, creating, and communicating, all while working with other students remotely online.
The list will look familiar to any teacher because it’s the list of 4Cs for learning. These skills are timeless, but the process of how kids learn them needs a massive update compared to our current model. The good news is that many Zoomers are already experimenting with new approaches to the 4Cs. The bad news is that even more Zoomers still do not have the access to these learning opportunities, which is something that we need to change with both public and private sector resources.
Zoomers will lead the way for learning innovation in critical thinking, creating, communicating, and collaborating, especially related to video.
While YouTube will still be around, Zoomers will have many more choices in the future. This has already started with BYJU, 2U, Coursera, Yuanfudao, Masterclass, #Yellowbrick, #Swivl, #Edpuzzle, Outlier, and Podia (# is a Fresco investment) as some of the companies innovating with video in learning, plus of course Khan Academy and many other non-profits. Learners will get many more choices during the next 5 years and beyond.
Working ☁️
I started working from home in early 2011 while figuring out the first iterations of Fresco Capital. If Matt Mullenweg and the team at Automattic could power the internet without a single centralized physical office, it was worth taking a similar perspective as an early stage venture capital firm. Even then, there were like minded entrepreneurs who appreciated the benefits of having investors with a global view early in the life of a startup. I can confirm that there were very few investors doing that at the time — it was definitely a contrarian approach.
Fast forward several years, and 2020 is when many people have been forced to explore working outside of centralized offices. Matt’s framework is helpful for reviewing the both the opportunities and challenges:
While much of this is still called remote work or work from home, these phrases remind me of reading about horseless carriages when people were first using automobiles. Distributed work is closer to the mark, though even that tends to make it sound like work is about individuals who happen to interact. In fact, the work taking place is critical thinking, creating, communicating, and collaborating in a shared community. This community happens to live in the cloud.
So where am I really working these days? I am working across several cloud communities.
And, yes, the future of learning and working are intimately intertwined. It is up to all of us a society to make sure that Zoomers have the opportunities to access these cloud communities or otherwise our current digital divide will lead directly to a lifelong economic divide.
What about the concerns regarding artificial intelligence and robots taking all the jobs?
This is a real concern for older generations, and society must provide additional support. At the same time, Zoomers already understand the importance of using technology instead of being used by technology, and will be leading the way with augmented intelligence and a new kind of entrepreneur economy.
What does augmented intelligence mean for a Zoomer? During the past few months in between online school classes, my Zoomer son was missing his regular dose of Manchester United and other sports. So he created his own virtual team online, the San Diego Stampede, including using a free tool to create AI generated player faces. This specific project did not take very long to start and it might not last very long, but it shows how Zoomers can add their own ideas on top of even very recent AI tools.
In the past few years, there was a false narrative that companies were either super innovative, high growth startups or just plain old small companies.
A more authentic entrepreneur economy will give entrepreneurs the opportunity to scale businesses in many different ways by building on the various tools and support already created. There is an endless list of tools for people working in technology, and there is also a whole wave of tools for non-technical users.
While most job titles do not contain the word “sales”, most jobs actually include some element of persuading, influencing, or convincing others to make an exchange — in other words, some form of sales. Salesforce was the first pure cloud company focused on sales and worked especially well for large enterprises. That still left out most entrepreneurs who wanted even simpler and more affordable sales tools.
This gap is being filled by more specialized players like HubSpot for inbound sales leads, #Pipedrive for smaller sales teams, DocSend for sharing sales content, DocuSign for signing contracts, #LeadIQ for sales development reps, #Glints for finding Zoomer sales talent, Drift for website funnels, Front for shared customer communication, Proposify for proposal workflow, and of course Zoom plus 260,013 other video platforms (# is a Fresco investment). Beyond sales, the opportunity for transforming workflow and supporting people for all kinds of work is exponentially larger.
Zoomers will connect across cloud communities and use tools for augmented intelligence to build a more authentic entrepreneur economy.
Money 🤑
Learning and working are also very connected to the topic money. We are living in a unique period in history, with interest rates reaching the lowest levels in 5,000 years while the events of 2020 are likely to exacerbate the already dramatic wealth inequalities in the world. Zoomers will add a whole new dimension to the mix.
Zoomers don’t visit bank branches in streets, they don’t believe in too big to fail banks, and they definitely don’t watch bank commercials on YouTube or other video sites.
In China, the top two digital payments brands are Alipay (55% market share) and WeChatPay / QQ Wallet (both owned by Tencent, 39% market share), with the digital payments reaching 59.8 trillion yuan (8.5 trillion dollars) in the last quarter of 2019. India is also growing quickly, with the new UPI platform processing 5.8 trillion rupees (77 trillion dollars) in the final quarter of 2019. Apple and Google are bringing this growth to even more countries globally, and COVID-19 is likely to accelerate the push to digital payments.
While those are already large numbers, digital payments as a category is just the thin edge of the wedge in financial services.
The winners in the Zoomer age of money will focus on two things: scaling data driven finance and building trusted financial brands. Most banks have lagged badly with data and also lost significant brand value during the past 15 years.
Focusing on a very relevant topic for Zoomers today, let’s look at student financing. #CommonBond, Prodigy Finance, SoFi, #MPOWER Financing, and Future Finance are focused on providing student loans while Vemo Education and many other companies are providing options even beyond loans (# is a Fresco investment). The capital providers who chase their borrowers using a purely data driven approach while ignoring the human aspects will steadily burn their brand with Zoomers. The capital providers who proactively support their borrowers with guidance and complementary resources will steadily build their brand with Zoomers, and be in a prime position to build enduring relationships.
At the end of the day, Zoomers won’t care if the future of money is digital cash, Bitcoin, Libra, non-fungible tokens backed by sneakers, or something even yet to be created. What they will care about is trusted brands.
Zoomers will transform the future of money and the biggest winners will combine data driven finance with trusted financial brands.
The most trusted brand among Zoomers is Xbox. And they are already very comfortable using virtual currencies in video games. Could Xbox become the world’s largest bank in the future? Stranger things have happened.
Sustainability ♻️
While Zoomers have concerns about money, they are also worried about other things. At the end of 2019, guess what was ranked as the number one issue facing the world by a survey of more than 10,000 Zoomers across 22 countries?
It should come as no surprise that it was climate change.
The chaotic reaction globally to COVID-19 has been a preview of the future challenges humanity faces regarding climate change. If Zoomers were worried about climate change in 2019, they are now firmly convinced that more action is needed to reduce our negative climate feedback loop.
It’s no secret that the oil industry has a huge role in creating carbon emissions. And there are an increasing number of lists (take your pick) identifying companies who have the largest negative impact on our planet. Any brand that wants to either sell to Zoomers (as consumers already and as business decision makers in the future) or recruit Zoomers as talent, had better be taking serious steps to reduce harmful environmental impact.
But that’s just the baseline.
The biggest potential is to create sustainable loops with positive externalities instead of negative externalities. In addition to the positive environmental impact, these sustainable loops should also help the economy, including Zoomers, with jobs and money.
Nature is already way ahead of us in create sustainable loops, with examples such as the dry Sahara desert dust feeding nutrients to the amazing Amazon rainforest.
We are making fascinating new discoveries about our planet through technology, and Zoomers will be especially able to appreciate that nature and technology should be complementary rather than adversarial. This will combine changes created by Zoomer led demand pull and technology driven supply push to have more accurate and timely data, leading to a whole new layer of digital infrastructure built for both our cities specifically, and our planet generally.
In the past, people have referred to smart cities, but the emphasis will shift to living cities that are more resilient, more durable, and safer, while embracing change and creativity. This will include technology, and this will include trees. Sometimes even technology and trees together.
Cities will still need things from outside, and our current supply chains will be reconfigured away from optimizing for efficiency and towards sustainable loops. This will cover everything from food to fashion to electronics. The shift was already underway before 2020 with the help of data and tools from companies that include Flexport, Planet, #Spire, ICEYE, Descartes Labs, FarEye, #Riskpulse, #Compology, and ReCollect, while COVID-19 is also the tragic catalyst for faster adoption of 3D printing (# is a Fresco investment).
Zoomers will accelerate the shift towards sustainable loops through living cities and new supply chains that are more resilient, more durable, and safer, while embracing change and creativity.
Wellness 😷
Before 2020, it would have seemed early to talk about the impact that Zoomers will have on global health and wellness. The events related to COVID-19 have reoriented everyone, including Zoomers, to an alternate future. This generation will transform global health systems much faster than any generation in history.
2020 has shown the stark gap between countries and within countries when it comes to healthcare access. People with access to high quality healthcare expertise and resources are managing relatively well. The problem is that far too many people do not have this access, with devastating consequences in both the short-term and long-term. Zoomers will be part of the push for broader healthcare access.
Telemedicine is here to stay, which is especially relevant for Zoomers because they will be leading the global discussion around increasing much needed mental health support. Smartphones will become the single largest first point of access to healthcare services, supporting the new Zoomer heroes, nurses and doctors, plus scarce hospital bed capacity for situations that require additional attention.
In addition to improving healthcare access, there is a clear need for better data and analysis. Data can be used first to simply understand what is currently going on — 2020 has proven that is easy to write and hard to do. Data plus models can be used to make forecasts and, importantly, go back to understand why the forecasts were wrong. Large scale health data sets can also generate evidence based insights for new healthcare innovation.
At the individual level, health data has the potential to drastically improve precision health. Each person’s health is a complex interaction of the surrounding environment, family genes, and personal habits.
Zoomers will learn from examples like the patient-centric system in Estonia and realize that they should have fundamental rights to health data, including data about notes, tests, prescriptions, records, genes, bills, lifestyle tracking, and even data access history. Precision health will especially benefit people with rare diseases — to identify the right diagnosis and to lower the cost of specialized treatment.
Many pieces of the puzzle for a truly tech enabled healthcare ecosystem have already been started by companies such as Livongo, Tempus, #Evidation Health, Komodo Health, Halodoc, Kinsa, BreezoMeter, Calm, Atomwise, Oura Ring, #Chai Bio, Human API, #Thalamus, Butterfly Network, and #Phable (# is a Fresco investment).
These pieces will be increasingly connected through network science, both in terms of technology and people. More generally, Zoomers will embrace evidence based holistic wellness for prevention, prediction, and treatment because 2020 made clear to everyone that health is not a static event, it is a dynamic process.
Risks from infectious and chronic diseases are not separate, they overlap. Poor mental health leads to poor physical health. Exposure to nature, even inside cities, make us healthier. Financial stress creates multiple problems for health. Workers deserve healthy conditions, even outside of centralized locations.
We need both more innovative specific solutions for each issue, and we need more innovative system solutions.
Zoomers will demand broader health access and fundamental health data rights while embracing evidence based holistic wellness for prevention, prediction, and treatment.
The Zoomer Age 🌟
We all have a role to play in the Zoomer age and their future is also our future. I will continue to mentor Zoomers, and in return ask them to keep mentoring me.
Zoomers will transform learning, working, money, sustainability, and wellness.
These areas are not separate — they will overlap and interact. If we get things wrong, the negative feedback loops will be tragic. If we get things right, the positive feedback loops will unlock new opportunities for both Zoomers and future generations.
“Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”
