Styles recycle. Ideas come back into fashion. Everything popular dies out, and sometimes they come back. This is a basic premise that many people believe in. And I think it should drive both innovation and investment.
The idea is to identify a macro trend and then find industries that will become increasingly affected by this trend. One movement which piqued my interest for many years was the idea of the sharing economy. The sharing economy includes several companies - from Uber, which is pushing more and more to try and get you not to own a car, to Spotify, which pushes the idea that owning music is less important than having access to it.
But, I believe the pendulum on the sharing economy is nearing its apex and will start to return. The current pandemic is pushing this return faster and faster. People are starting to realize that life is dull if you're locked out of "renting things".
This shift is happening. Homeownership rates are accelerating at an increasingly fast rate. But this is just one industry... So, this raises three leading questions.
- Is this shift happening in one industry, or is this a mindset shift that will power human behavior?
- If this is more of a fundamental shift, what other industries are going to be affected?
- What companies are poised to take advantage of this shift?
Admittedly, I think it's a bit early to call winners or losers in this pendulum shift. Because I am not convinced that we've quite tipped "peak sharing economy". But once we do, there are a few businesses which I think could be interesting.
- Business Owned Cloud Companies: Renting out cloud space is great. You can scale your computing needs as required. But it brings challenges, mainly that you are inherently sharing a large portion of your data. Owned "walled" off clouds could be a fix.
- Collectible Companies: Collectables have gone well out of style. But collecting things is a form of ownership. This may exist in both the physical and digital world. Someone like Pinterest could propel this forward.
- Personal data ownership companies: Some companies have existed for awhile, pushing the concept of owning your own data and selling it to companies at will. These companies may have sprung up too early but could come into vogue as the pendulum swings back to ownership.