The Next Trillion-Dollar Company
As a young person, at the beginning of his career, I am asking myself, where are the trillion-dollar companies of the next two decades going to come from?
Over the past two decades, we’ve watched several tech companies become trillion-dollar companies. These companies used the power of the internet and technology to bring software, hardware, e-commerce, and social networks to billions of people. Their achievements are inspiring and have brought tremendous good to the world.
As a young person, at the beginning of his career, I am asking myself, where are the trillion-dollar companies of the next two decades going to come from?
There are many opinions and ways of thinking about this question and I want to focus on the industries that are going to produce the next trillion-dollar companies.
There are 4 industries at the beginning of decades of monumental growth and implementation that will produce trillion-dollar companies.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Blockchain
- Biotech
- Greentech
Here is a brief overview of each:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human thinking to analyze huge amounts of data. There are different subcategories of Artificial intelligence and you’ll probably hear terms like machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision used. Each of these is a slightly different implementation of the same core principle: How can we enable computers to analyze data and make decisions/draw conclusions from data in a similar way to how a human would?
Artificial intelligence is being used to build complex analytics models, recognize images and videos, and process text and speech. Some of the most well-known use-cases include autonomous vehicles, fraud detection for banks, chatbots, analysis of Xrays in hospitals, and search/recommendations algorithms and we are still at beginning of the impact we will see from AI.
AI requires a significant amount of computational power to process data. Without getting into the technical side of it, graphics processing units (GPUs) are at the core of this processing, and GPU technology has improved exponentially over the past decade. The abilities and use-cases of AI grow with GPU technology. This is one significant factor driving the growth and implementation of AI over the coming decades.
One of the areas which I am most excited about in artificial intelligence is personal health care. There are already products and services, such as Eight Sleep, Levels, Whoop, and others that collect your health data, like heart rate, breathing, sleep, and sugar levels, and use AI to analyze it and make recommendations for how to improve your health or catch illnesses and problems early. These services are only getting more accurate, comprehensive, and useful.
Blockchain. Crypto. Decentralization. Bitcoin. These words are just some of the buzzwords which have spread across social media and our news like wildfire. Let’s avoid the hype, Dogecoin, and complexity and cut to the bottom line.
Blockchain is a powerful technology that is very new and is still being figured out. Blockchain is very complicated and I recommend checking this website for some simple explanations of fundamental blockchain terms and concepts.
Essentially, blockchain is a ledger that records pieces of information, particularly transactions. These transactions can be payments, loans, ownership of an asset, or any other piece of information. The power of the blockchain is that, once recorded, transactions can't be edited, a blockchain is not controlled by one central authority, and blockchain can be used to facilitate transactions between people who don't know enough about each other to trust each other.
Please see this post I wrote recently on the use cases of blockchain.
The blockchain industry is very new and there is so much innovation happening very quickly. I am most excited about the DeFi (decentralized finance) applications. These are financial services that run on a blockchain. The main advantage of these services over standard banks/financial services is that they remove the middleman. Instead of paying for, being limited by, and being at the mercy of a bank or other financial institution, DeFi users can borrow money in minutes, earn (significantly more than 0.5%) interest on money in an account and transact with people across the globe.
Biotech is the use of biology to solve problems and make products. One approach is genetic engineering which enables scientists to tailor the DNA of an organism.
The ability to effectively program cells and tell them what to do is a game-changer that has recently become reality. Two of the Covid-19 vaccines which have been most effective are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. These two use the same technology — mRNA.
mRNA is the set of instructions by which cells make all proteins and send them to various parts of the body. When biotech engineers code mRNA, they are able to edit the set of instructions and tell cells to make proteins and send them to specific parts of the body to prevent and fight disease.
Being able to edit the set of instructions like you would normal software, enables biotech engineers to generate many versions of the instructions for experimentation and testing. This greatly reduces the time it takes to bring a new medicine into the development process.
The wonders of mRNA described above are just the beginning. The biotech industry is massive and with new technology being rapidly developed the potential is exponential. It will improve vaccines, medicines, and farming and there are many other use cases. It is complicated but extremely exciting!
Greentech is products and technology which are designed to reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emission or remove greenhouse gases from the environment. Climate change and humans’ role in it can be complicated, nuanced, and controversial. If you want to learn more about it, I highly recommend reading Bill Gates’ book on climate change, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Interest, investment, and innovation in this industry have been growing steadily and it only going to increase. Greentech doesn’t only refer to clean ways of generating electricity like wind or solar power, it covers all aspects of the manufacturing and supply chain for almost every item we ever touch.
The manufacturing of things like cement, steel, and plastic generates greenhouse gases. As does the production of electricity and growing things like plants and animals. Obviously, the ways we travel, cars, planes, and ships, create greenhouse gasses. The heating and cooling of people and things like food are also sources of greenhouse gases.
This problem is not going away unless we see powerful innovation. The greatest companies are those which solve the biggest problems and this is a big problem.
I was discussing this topic with a family member a few days ago and she asked something which I’m thinking about a lot. It is a question a lot of people, particularly young people, can ask themselves…
