What is NOT going to change in the next 20 years?

This was prompted by a quote by Jeff Bezos.

(Also, I wrote part 1 of a post yesterday and published, but I’m going to be re-writing the whole thing, I realized that it wasn’t going in the direction I had planned when I was discussing it with someone else. Sometimes you have to press delete. In fact my last newsletter was incorrect in a lot of ways, excited to re-write it.)

I saw that Jeff Bezos plans for strategy based on what won’t change in the next 10 years, not what will change in the next 10 years, which is an interesting difference to make. So I asked the world…of Twitter, what is not going to change in the next 20 years, and the answers varied.

It’s a very simple question, but you can definitely understand why there were so many different answers. It depends how you look at the question.

This is my answer to the unchanging in humanity:

• There are basic human needs: Food, Shelter, Water, Rest, Security/Safety

• There are humans desires: Connection, Love, Friendship, Sex

• Humanities desire to search for knowledge, communication and creativity.

• Exchanging goods and services. And goods for services… although this is really about security and connection.

And I think that about covers everything. It’s similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

It’s interesting, if you look at these unchanging things, as the protocols that exist beneath everything, you can then see that the technology humans have created is attempting to scale each of these things to everyone on the planet. Which means all technology is building interfaces for these unchanging things, but how we interact with them is what changes.

Amazon made it cheaper and easier to find and buy books - Scaling the search for knowledge and commerce.

Google made it easier to index information - Flatten the worlds information to scale the search for knowledge.

Facebook made it cheaper and easier to connect with people in the world - Scaling communication and connection.

All of these feed into my thesis that we are all just humans on one rock, hurtling through space and time… So invest your time and capital in things that unlock the things that don’t change over time for humanity.

By Adam Draper

I ponder as a VC.

It's a quick one minute read to make you think, smile, or laugh.

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