“One must put themselves in the path of giants.”
– Lillian Cauldwell

Introduction

Over the last hundred years, five major trends have dominated Silicon Valley (SV): “Electronic Tools,” “Semiconductor,” “Enterprise,” “Telecom,” and “Consumer.” A sixth trend has emerged. We call it “Smart Enterprise.”

The Smart Enterprise wave will disrupt nearly every major sector of the global economy and dramatically improve productivity within those sectors, because it disrupts non-linear decision-making processes that are central to how major industries conduct business and create value. These decision-making processes have been complicated over the last two decades by the vast growth of digital information. In the past five years alone, the amount of data in existence has grown nine-fold, to over 2 trillion gigabytes. This increase has brought a corresponding increase in data complexity, formats, and silos that require sophisticated technology platforms to help knowledge workers process and leverage the information effectively.

Emerging Smart Enterprise platforms represent a significant investment opportunity. Companies can now measure, analyze, and aggregate large data sets to inform mission critical projects. Examples of digital data that were not previously accessible include energy consumption and production data from sensor networks; data on government expenditures and transactions; exposure and transaction data from institutional and private wealth portfolios; genomic IT data and information-related outcome analysis in healthcare; logistics and network distribution information; and personalized education data on student cohorts. At 8VC, our investment thesis involves identifying, building, and investing in the most value-creating platforms, especially in these industries with inherent winner-take-all dynamics.

Old Enterprise to Smart Enterprise

Companies like Oracle and SAP led the first enterprise wave by streamlining back-office processes to make corporations more efficient. Enterprise software helped push paper faster and speed up routine business tasks; think of “TPS reports” from the movie “Office Space”. Large, big-box software solutions streamlined the “assembly line” and brought basic automation to linear processes, such as payroll, accounting, supply chain and inventory management.

Although pioneering in its time, innovation in this space grew stagnant. Existing technology infrastructure is ill-equipped to address the novel information challenges that major industries face, making the process difficult and error-prone to append new features and add-ons. Clunky and dysfunctional user interfaces demand lengthy employee-training sessions and CTOs pay IT consultants large contracts just to create reports from the data. Implementation of the systems themselves can take months and sometimes years. The biggest companies devote much of their resources to sales and marketing efforts rather than serious innovation. Perhaps for these reasons, Y-Combinator once wrote: “If you don’t think you’re smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software.

In the Smart Enterprise space, companies are re-inventing and replacing the decades old technology infrastructure behind major industries. To accomplish this, engineers are solving hard technology problems involved in integrating disparate data into conceptual structures that knowledge workers can intuitively access and manipulate. Valuable, machine-generated data resides in diverse sources: databases, excel spreadsheets, and other unstructured forms on the internet. By unlocking the patterns in and usability of the data, knowledge workers will solve problems the creators of the software did not even foresee. For example, in the intelligence community, analysts can complete complex tasks — like tracking international moneylaundering schemes or re-building communities in war-torn areas — that require connections across networks informed by structured and unstructured data. The same goes for global bankers, multinational lawyers, retailers with distributed supply chains, medical researchers, and other professionals who face complex challenges.

Defining Smart Enterprise

1. Integrate heterogeneous big data and empower knowledge workers to solve non-linear problems.

2. Leverage recent IT advances — chiefly from the consumer wave — to solve critical challenges in major industries.

3. Potential to harness network effects within industry verticals and become platforms, increasing innovation by enabling novel applications to quickly spread throughout the industry.

PLATFORM TECHNOLOGY

Platforms typically begin as useful applications to solve single problems, such as electronic healthcare records, student information services, or energy consumption reduction. As the platforms gain access to increasing amounts of data, the owners of the platform may build additional applications and eventually an open infrastructure to allow third party developers to innovate as well. These vertical platforms can enable application developers to reach tens of thousands of users without having to re-create the application for each medical office, school system, or energy grid.

At present, for instance, if a developer builds a market-changing technology to improve operations at a municipal water facility, the facility owner can apply the product in that locale only. However, developing a standardized platform across water districts will exponentially increase the platform’s value, by simplifying complexity in huge networks of information. For another example, consider the mobile space, where extensive software and hardware ecosystems have grown around the Android and iOS platforms. An iOS developer can build one application and potentially reach over 400 million iOS devices.

This openness pushes new waves of innovation as go-to-market costs plummet for application developers. The owners of the platforms, in turn, capture winner-take-all dynamics. In major old-line industries, where incumbent players feed off of closed infrastructure, market shifts will be especially pronounced for those smart enterprise technology companies able to insert themselves into the technology infrastructure and integrate disparate data sets.

INDUSTRY TRANSFORMATION

The major enterprise industries, including government, energy, finance, healthcare, and business services, comprise 70% of industry value as a percent of GDP. Each of these industries suffers deep inefficiencies. To see some of these problems and the solutions underway, consider the following examples from companies in the 8VC portfolio and investment pipeline.

Government

Problem: State and local governments spend more than $30 billion on old enterprise software, built for the paper environment. Knowledge workers cannot derive insights, ask relevant questions, or manage information flow. Sometimes they cannot even tell how much money their entity spends. As a result, cities across America find themselves in financial crisis — in California alone, three cities filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Solution: The platform being built by OpenGov allows governments to visualize critical financial data; analyze the data to flag waste; perform cross-city comparisons and benchmarks to find best practices and new efficiencies; and share financial transactions and budget colloborations to improve transparency and workflows.

Energy

Problem: Energy consumption in developed and emerging markets continues to rise while production becomes more challenging. As easily accessible sources are depleted, producers must target more technically complex fields to extract natural resources. For example, more than 50% of original U.S. oil reserves remain down hole leaving 100 billion barrels ($10 trillion) which are not economically recoverable today.

Solution: Equipping production wells with sensors and big data applications could drive 100% improvements in efficiency and extraction. Through novel sensor technology and software, NeoTek optimizes production and reservoir models to overcome the problem of leaving much of the oil within the reservoirs behind. Taxon Biosciences utilizes a proprietary bioinformatics approach to develop and identify microbial species that accelerate the conversion of unconventional energy sources (heavy oil, coal, shale oil.) to natural gas.

Financial Services

Problem: Private wealth management firms spend more than $10 billion to separately create and maintain their financial aggregation, reporting, and analysis infrastructure. Innovation is slow because no single platform exists. Millions of people receive PDFs from funds and manually enter data into their systems from a variety of schemas, causing confusion, enabling fraud, and inhibiting sophisticated analysis. itinfrastructure

Solution: Addepar is building an open platform to help investors access and understand their information. Addepar aggregates disparate sets of data, reconciles and augments that data, and provides best-in-class analysis and reporting for large private banks and registered investment advisors (RIA). For the first time, investors see all their data in real time, allowing them to perform lightning-fast analysis to address concerns while they are manageable and relevant. As an open platform, Addepar will foster an ecosystem of applications and fundamentally change how a large segment of the financial sector sells products and services. For example, a company selling tax deferral insurance products could write an application for the platform to empower an advisor to see exactly which of his clients could save money with its products and how it would work. Rather than being re-written and customized for every RIA or family office, an open platform allows the application to automatically and intelligently manage trillions of dollars of capital.

The IT infrastructure that runs major industries has been kludged together in pieces in vain attempts to keep up with the demands of big data analyses, and is ready to be replaced.

Healthcare

Problem: The healthcare industry remains largely paper-based, and current systems are ill-equipped to handle transformational innovations, such as electronic medical records, cheaper testing solutions, and full genetic sequencing for individuals.

Solution: Innovation from startups like Health Tap, Palantir, and Practice Fusion may save hundreds of billions of dollars, by bringing data and doctor interaction online and then enabling patients and doctors to make informed decisions. Leveraging these interactions and data with insurance companies and healthcare organizations will add massive value per patient and simultaneously lower costs.

Business Services

Problem: Although many functions, such as sales, recruiting, and business development, have transitioned into the cloud, data analysis still requires manual collection and input. Volume, accuracy, and timeliness of information are compromised in the process, which reduces the value of the information in these digital systems.

Solution: RelateIQ is transforming the CRM space by building a technology solution to collect data automatically from available sources to enable intelligent insights for sales, recruiting, investor management, and other critical business pipelines. With access to communication data within and between organizations, RelateIQ leverages advances in data science to create advanced, real-time collaboration tools to dramatically improve key business functions.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STARTUPS IN SMART ENTERPRISE

Startups will play an important role in the Smart Enterprise wave. This is not obvious to many outside of Silicon Valley. For most of the twentieth century, innovation came from large corporations, including places like Bell Labs, GE, Xerox PARC, and HP. Those companies invested large sums into innovation; because innovators had to build everything from the ground up, large corporations were among the few entities that could afford to outfit competitive technology teams. They also supported cultures that attracted brilliant people. But the financial cost to innovate has decreased in the last few decades, and it continues to fall. Today’s computers and software systems support rapid conceptual iteration orders of magnitude more powerful than those at the disposal of scientists at Bell Labs. In an inter-temporal hackathon competition, a couple of today’s top engineers would run circles around a team of top talent from 20 to 30 years ago, in any area and at a fraction of the cost.

Technology startups maintain other advantages. Incentives in a focused technology culture are better aligned, because the upside for a particular project is shared among the value-creators. Smaller teams can also maintain more nimble development cycles, flexible work environments, and an absence of politicking and bureaucracy. For these reasons, Smart Enterprise startups attract the top talent now. Palantir, for instance, is regularly cited as attracting the top engineers and other companies like Box, Addepar, and RelateIQ attract top engineers as well.

Given this powerful dynamic, many talented young technologists and entrepreneurs sense the startup opportunity and write off large corporations completely. This is misguided. The global marketplace is an evolving ecosystem, with startups and large corporations playing increasingly complementary roles. To address the world’s hard problems and drive progress, startups need corporations and corporations need startups.

Corporations have scale, existing relationships, and distribution advantages in large, established industries such as energy, education, healthcare, logistics, financial services, and government services. Corporations also possess latent knowledge and expertise by virtue of past work on major problems. They may know better than startups the next complex, valuable problems likely to emerge. Accordingly, and notwithstanding that they may have an advantage on the innovation side, many Smart Enterprise startups would do well to partner with large corporations that control the data, the knowledge workers, and the distribution channels. These partnerships will prove especially valuable in industries that require significant upfront capital investments.

Conclusion

Despite crises in governments and other important institutions, we believe that the Smart Enterprise wave will fundamentally disrupt key sectors of the economy and enable a prosperous 21st century. 8VC invests in new technology platforms that transform how critical industries tackle increasingly difficult challenges. These emerging platforms will re-invent the core intelligent infrastructure of major industries and create out-sized economic value for those who use the platforms, create them, and invest in them. As Smart Enterprise platforms become widely deployed over the coming decade, entrepreneurs will shift their effort toward developing applications on these vertical platforms. Platform-enabled application ecosystems will positively impact global productivity and growth.

At its core, innovation is about solving hard problems that matter to the industries that run our world. Startups will solve these problems. But they, and those that support them, will succeed by understanding the industries dominated by established players and, in many cases, by learning how to work well with industry leaders to solve hard problems and scale the solutions. For their part, large corporations must partner well and share the upside with innovative Smart Enterprise companies, or they will fall behind.

We have many reasons to remain hopeful and must work together to solve the world’s biggest problems. More people aspire to entrepreneurship today than at any point in the past century. Costs to innovate have plummeted. Engineers have the opportunity to build and focus their talent and energy on major global problems. Together, we will confront difficult technology challenges to help knowledge workers operate more efficiently within the largest industries. These tasks are worthy of our top entrepreneurial and engineering talent, and it is the role of the top technology funds to support and nourish these emerging ecosystems.

Joe Lonsdale
Partner, 8VC
Founder, Palantir and Addepar

“How can I live among this gentle obsolescent breed of heroes and not weep?
Unicorns, almost, for they are fading into two legends in which their stupidity and chivalry are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal”
— Keith Douglas, Aristocrats, 1943

The Decline and Fall of the American Aristocracy

The global economy will transform in the next decade. The present post-industrial economy, in which developed countries experience the limits of extensive growth, will give way to a digital global economy that requires different skills for workers and investors. Fortunes are at risk. Last-generation business models will collapse and a new generation of investors and entrepreneurs will create value across old-line industries through new trends in Information Technology (IT).

The Second Industrial Revolution serves as a guide for the disruption ahead. In the early 1880s, the British aristocracy, which controlled immense wealth built on generations of land ownership and agricultural production, felt assured of its economic dominance for generations. Yet by the mid-1890s, agricultural incomes had dropped due to increased competition spurred by improved transportation and production methods. Land prices fell precipitously, and fortunes collapsed.

Rather than keep pace with technological change, aristocrats bought land in Australia, Canada, and the United States. They used the land to pursue familiar business practices like cattle ranching, mining, and agriculture. Not only were economic conditions for these industries as bad, if not worse, overseas as in the U.K, but also cultural values so misaligned that, according to one commentator, “the Englishman” became synonymous with “inefficiency, unhandiness, inadaptability,” and “irritating, repetitious cocksureness.” By WWI, the aristocrats had lost hundreds of years of accumulated family wealth due to a basic ignorance of the forces shifting wealth up the value chain from landowners and commodity producers to industrialists with optimized manufacturing and operational systems.

In the present age of creative destruction, trillions of dollars will be lost by institutions and families that cling to the cornerstones of traditional wealth management practices. Those that survive and flourish in the coming transformation will leverage innovation, adapt practices to new standards, and address global challenges by applying new technology to the worlds of energy, finance, government administration, healthcare, education, and commerce. Businesses in which MBAs outnumber technologists, that reward age and connections over ideas and ethics, and that propagate the mindset that lawyers and consultants dictate value and deserve control face a painful decline. Product superiority will reign.

II. Understanding the Coming Transformation

Like the aristocrats of the nineteenth century, family offices and private wealth managers today hold wealth preservation as their primary goal. They seek allocation diversity, flocking to “safe” investments in big banks and large-cap multinationals. These investments are not safe. Ignoring Mike Markkula’s advice to Steve Jobs that long-term corporate survival requires continual reinvention or “metamorphoses,” most banks and large public companies adhere to business practices because those practices worked a generation ago. They fail to see that preserving wealth in the coming transformation will require family offices and private wealth managers to bet intelligently on a macroeconomic landscape subject to technological disruption.

A. PRINCIPAL THEMES
Investors must understand the principal themes at work in the coming transformation. These themes include: (i) Open platforms that promote transparency and information sharing; (ii) a trend toward higher-level conceptual work and man-machine symbiosis; and (iii) applications that enable personalization and customization across business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions.

1. Open Platforms that promote transparency and information sharing
Old-economy businesses from encyclopedias to airlines have depended for generations on fractured communications to preserve information asymmetries, skewed pricing, and limited choice. This will change. To see why, consider an operating system like Android, now the best-selling smartphone platform in the world with over 300 million devices in use and 850,000 activations every day. Instead of internal content generation, the system enables and encourages application developers to create and offer content on the Android platform. Handset customers choose among hundreds of thousands of applications, from Yelp to IMDB to Chess, which the platform owner (Google in this case) did not create.

iOS, Apple’s competing product, works the same way, although it is not quite as open. This will prove a disadvantage for iOS and Android will emerge as the dominant operating system (Android is expected to be operating 31.1% of the 1.84 billion smart devices by 2016, whereas iOS will operate 17.3% of the devices in 2016). These open operating systems compete with one another for users and for content. Companies like Nokia ignore this strategy, relying instead on closed platform operations. Closed platforms will lose. Capturing upside by boxing out competitive innovation cannot compete, whether in smartphones or in other systems, because open platforms will out-develop closed platforms.

2. Higher-level conceptual work and man-machine symbiosis
Increased conceptualization and abstraction will drive value to businesses that leverage high-level and abstract thought while decreasing reliance on rote work. Man-machine symbiosis, the idea that people drive strategy while machines calculate, will direct work according to comparative advantage.

Increasingly, machines do well-defined rote work better than people, but machines do not write code or articulate ideas better than people. J.C.R. Licklider articulated this idea in the 1960s: “Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. . . . Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.”

This phenomenon has surfaced, and not just in the sciences. Palantir Technologies, for example, helps analysts in certain areas of finance and government spend 95% less time doing rote work, meaning that the best analysts spend more time iterating on their hypotheses and sharing results rather than manipulating spreadsheets in Excel, cleaning data, or writing code. Apple’s new app, Siri, which seeks to replace basic assistant work, provides a similar illustration. As people increasingly do what people do best, combined with machines doing what machines do best, value propositions change dramatically.

3. Applications to enable personalization and customization
Information technology that enables personalized solutions will turn twentieth-century mass production techniques into relics. This trend portends much more than the ability to pre-order a custom BMW (or modify it after market) or have initials stitched onto a French cuff. It means that rather than a single vineyard running a wine club and determining what bottle to send according to availability, a recommendation algorithm will direct a “hand-picked” bottle from a range of vineyards based on a detailed assessment of tastes. Programs will “learn” an individual’s interests and even basic decision-making biases — based on, for example, where one walks, drives, or flies, or who one connects with on social media platforms. That learning will inform target advertisements, suggest charities, and make vacation recommendations. As technology intelligently engages with consumers and purchasers based on personality, history, and loyalties, businesses will capture more of the long-tail. This is not the case just for retail; in industries as diverse as healthcare, wealth management, and B2B services, processing relevant contextual information will lead to tailored products and services that are far superior to those presently available.

B. MACROECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES
These themes will engender social and political challenges, as well as investment risk. First, unemployment will rise as automation and off-shoring squeeze the middle class and as skills fail to match the needs of a changing economy. Income will move in a ‘sociological butterfly’ where the middle is hollowed and the very high-end and the lower-middle socioeconomic classes continue to grow. Global competition will keep unemployment and under-employment high for a protracted period, leading to disenchantment with markets, dubious legislative proposals to stanch job losses, and social unrest.Power players, like bank leaders, will seek to influence policy. Governments will accrue more debt. Countries that want to compete, including the U.S., will have to fight hard to keep a level playing field for new IT-enabled businesses to compete against established players who may argue that disruption brings unbearable political difficulty.

Second, and related, wealth stratification will grow by virtue of the high stakes — the fortunes created by new technology winners will be immense. Indeed, the present age is a sort of twenty-first century gold rush, in which technology entrepreneurs and their backers seek to claim the many platforms that should, but do not yet exist. More wealth will be created than lost as the economy becomes more efficient, but much of the wealth will reside in illiquid investments, not public equities. The most connected investors, those who work most closely with the best technologists and entrepreneurs, will reap outsized gains. This trend buttresses the likelihood of widespread disenchantment, political volatility, and social unrest.

Third, public and credit markets will experience continued volatility as new platforms and innovations wipe out established companies. Markets will not easily process the uncertainties, particularly where icons of twentieth-century technology, like HP and Kodak for instance, must steer massive organizations toward new business lines that leverage intellectual property portfolios and software development. The prospects for start-ups and young companies may engender optimistic valuations, subject to wild swings as the market receives product iterations and sales figures. As industries transform, major winners and losers will emerge over short periods of time and markets will rewrite valuations more rapidly than in the past.

Fourth, as certain types of information increase in value, the amount and severity of cyber attacks will increase. Nearly every Fortune 500 company has suffered data theft, and governments in particular are subject to compromise and scandal from a range of attackers from basement-dwelling teenagers to international syndicates like Wikileaks. With increased reliance on IT, companies will have to invest in costly protections. Prophylactic technologies will become cheaper, better, and more broadly adopted over time, but attacks also will grow in sophistication, perpetuating an arms race of sorts.

Fifth, as IT further integrates into our lives and traditions, views of privacy, community, and identity will transform. Individuals may enjoy less personal interaction, which will contribute to feelings of depression and isolation in society. Countries like Korea already deal with high gaming and online addiction rates. In one case, a man died in an Internet café after playing games for 50 hours. Distrust of, and disaffection with, technology may grow and may result in a cultural backlash against those who research, develop, propagate, and invest in technology. In August 2011, for example, an anti-technology terrorist group in Mexico sent a parcel bomb to two university professors at one of Mexico’s leading technical research universities. The group claiming responsibility cited Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who advocated for the abolition of the industrial-technological age as their primary influence..Despite the challenges, the coming transformation will be worth its costs. Better technology will enable new types of connection, creativity, and insights that will radically elevate standards of living. As explained below, software, mobile, and Internet advances will increase outputs in energy markets while lowering costs and conserving resources, add to the efficiency of governments, democratize global finance while reducing risk, improve access and outcomes in global healthcare, create more equal and optimized educational experiences, and offer more opportunity for personal joy and satisfaction.

III. Drivers of the Coming Transformation

Given the prospect of volatility from both an economic and sociological standpoint, understanding the drivers of the coming transformation and the anticipated effects on old-line industries will help mitigate individual investment risk.

IT advances have created a possibility-gap in business process efficiency that is, in most major industries, larger than it has been since the nineteenth century. Workers and managers alike spend hours daily searching for information to which they should have ready, automated access — information like the strengths and weaknesses of various teams or performance statistics on certain plants or branches. The platforms and technology-driven processes missing from major industries are especially important in areas involving large amounts of information, like energy, finance, government, healthcare, and education.

In fact, the potential for efficiency gains is so great that relatively small companies with good IT, albeit lesser scale and fewer distribution channels, will outperform larger, more-established, and better-networked businesses. In some cases, larger businesses will purchase upstarts and integrate them effectively. In other cases, new technology, particularly in the software, mobile, and Internet spaces, will redefine the core of those businesses and their cultures, forcing a transition that few companies will make.

A. SOFTWARE, MOBILE, AND INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES
Software, mobile, and Internet technologies will drive the trends in open sourcing, man-machine symbiosis, and customization. As these technologies rapidly deploy, the most effective business processes will require them, fueling further expansion in these areas. Consequently, the most successful applications will be those that integrate the three elements.

1. Software and new enterprise
Many of the best investments of the previous generation have been in software and this will remain true in the coming transformation. New software will support connectivity and improve data analysis, visualization, and modeling, improving efficiency across industries and industry subsectors. Following these improvements, market volume will increase from nearly half a trillion dollars in 2012 to over $640 billion by 2015.

New enterprise software — software that enables conceptual work and new networks of collaboration — holds particular promise. Traditional enterprise software has focused on well-defined processes in areas that require little conceptual thought, such as payroll, reporting, accounting, and human resource tracking. Perceived as a boring space, the prospect of iterating on esoteric data-intensive problems for the back-office failed to attract the most dynamic engineers. But now, because pervasive inefficiencies in these sectors require dynamic solutions that call on disparate domains to facilitate high-level conceptual work, many of the brightest minds work on hard problems involving enterprise software for old-line industry issues. These complicated enterprise problems will involve tremendous amounts of data, engendering a related field of innovation known as “Big Data,” discussed further below.

Good software will connect concepts and topics from disparate networks. For example, the need for collaboration in the intelligence and security domain demands that software jump across networks and gather data rather than wait for communication from specific departments. Many companies now focus on these types of solutions. The solutions will continue to improve as more of a knowledge worker’s data becomes available in application programming interfaces (APIs) hosted in the cloud, including mobile phone data, email data, and work data. New enterprise software will hold relevance to senior employees driving core business lines, not just HR staff and sales assistants. And it will provide value across organizations to people dealing with high-level policy questions.

2. Mobile platforms
Mobile platforms will accelerate internet accessibility and enable instant and low-cost access to increasing amounts of real-time and localized information. As near-field communications emerge, and apps like Ness and Any.do build intelligent profiles of what consumers want, where they go, and what they do, mobile interaction with consumers and businesses will deepen. Advances first made in the consumer space will spill into the rest of the global economy and affect thousands of businesses. Personalized information can convince people to visit their favorite restaurant and it can notify officers of a suspect’s movements.

Total global mobile traffic will grow 26x between 2010 and 2015 (from .24 to 6.3 exabytes/month). Asia shows the fastest mobile adoption rates in the world, driven by increasing wealth and openness to new technology. In 2009, Asia Pacific was the world’s largest mobile market, representing 57% of global mobile revenues. The most technologically developed regions, such as Japan and South Korea, will see increased smart phone usage — a tenfold increase by 2016 — while less developed countries will see heightened mobile penetration. Many new technologies developed in the U.S. will look to enter these Asian markets. Those that do so successfully will take advantage of a massive opportunity: By 2015, the 2.14 billion mobile users in the Asia Pacific will grow to 2.89 billion, at which time one out of every two mobile users in the world will reside in that region.

3. The Internet
Internet advances have democratized pricing, eliminated middlemen, and reduced the need for capital intensive infrastructure in markets ranging from books to stocks¬¬. The Internet also serves as the enabling infrastructure without which mobile and new enterprise software cannot function. New networks also continue to grow on the Internet and add value.

The hottest areas involve the social and interest graphs. The social graph, which refers to one’s web of relationships, has been mapped by Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites. The interest graph is less charted. The term refers to one’s web of likes or interests — or, as with the company Backplane, the web of one’s influences or inspiration. Given the huge market opportunity to tap into what people care about, as opposed to only who they care about, many of the best engineers in Silicon Valley now work in this space. Whether one hunts terrorists or sells gelato, networks offer exponentially more relevant data than do nodes. On Facebook, for example, brands already target influential people and use them to generate “likes.” Whole ecosystems of companies have emerged around this, because the winners will improve marketing and advertising by orders of magnitude.

The personal and social data referenced above speak to the broader, rapidly emerging field of “big data,” in which technologists compete to capture, store, search, analyze, and visualize massive data sets. In addition to the social and interest graphs, exploding quantities of data from other disciplines, ranging from public health to demography and polling to logistics, demand exceptional technologies that can process the data quickly and gain insight into its patterns. Companies that can map the largest data sets into conceptual structures that enable fast, intelligent data-driven decisions will create tremendous value. Companies like Relate IQ and Blend Labs work to combine social graph technology with Big Data through the empirical quantification of communication events and other markers of relationships. These companies and many other emerging newcomers will transform personal lives and disrupt established business throughout the sectors discussed below.

Again, investors must watch Asia. Global revenues in the consumer internet space are forecasted to reach $1 trillon by 2020, and Asia will account for 35% of total global spending by 2015. By 2020, Asia will account for more than 56% of global internet users. This increased internet adoption will affect not just advertising, but also many aspects of daily life, including how customers interact with businesses, how buyers and sellers of goods and services find one another, how marketplaces set prices, how individuals use and store personal and professional data, and how citizens interact with governments.

B. REMAKING THE OLD-ECONOMY
To understand the power of software, mobile, and Internet advances on old-line businesses, consider the potential effects on the multi-billion dollar cement industry. Operating plants struggle with poor communications, weak analytics, and problems in pricing, certification, customer service, maintenance, and overall profitability. One particular problem concerns the limited life of mixed concrete (concrete must be poured within a couple of hours of saturation). Expired shipments waste entire truckloads. Sometimes builders use shipments despite the loss of integrity, causing future problems or regulatory exposure. With better tracking through mobile and software platforms, site managers can charge penalties for delays or use mobile incentives or gamification techniques to save tens of millions of dollars and increase quality. Cloud-based applications will process operating data and web-based mobile applications will distribute timely information, improving efficiency and preventing disasters like the Big Dig in Boston. Targeted applications will improve communication by linking drivers, site managers, dispatchers, and mixers. Pricing will grow more accurate and personalized as customer and job information assimilate. Better data analysis will streamline manufacturing and distribution.

Similar developments in data management, analytics, information transfer, and process improvements will remake the worlds of energy, finance, government administration, healthcare, education, and commerce. In the next generation, these market segments will flatten the information landscape and gain in efficiency and cost savings, stability and security, processing power, analytical capabilities, network communications speed and depth, storage and automation, and functional abstract computing.

1. Energy
Given the size of the industry and rising demand, the energy sector holds the most potential for adoption of high-impact IT innovation. States increasingly recognize, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, that economic stability and growth require optimization of current power assets and new energy. The main opportunities for addressing these needs involve technologies that 1) increase efficiency of existing energy infrastructure; 2) improve energy generation through better exploration or alternative sources, and 3) create and improve methods to store energy.

Nowhere is the need for energy innovation more pressing than in large cities. Urbanization in equatorial and other warm-weather regions will strain the energy supply. Cooling demand in metropolitan Mumbai, for example, is equivalent to 24% of the cooling demand of the entire U.S. The standard solution to increasing energy usage has been weak legislation or public service announcements imploring people to conserve. Better IT will enable more effective solutions. Office buildings will receive real-time alerts to spark short-term adjustments, like minimizing cooling and lighting during off-peak times. Automatic sensors will shut down home electronics accidentally left on. Drivers will receive up-to-date notifications of open parking spaces or uncongested roads, reducing traffic and corresponding emissions. Smart grids will analyze and respond to energy demand moment-by-moment, optimizing plant usage to reduce both cost and outages. Smart meters will provide consumers and utilities with accurate usage information, allowing utilities to set prices that more accurately reflect demand. Consumers will benefit from concrete savings analyses.

By 2020, South Korea will have erected the first “smart city,” Songdo. By 2030, total global energy infrastructure will have undergone a $20 trillion transition. Operations management necessitates strong IT, including platforms to monitor, analyze, and control power generation, distribution, and consumption; dynamic pricing models; and automated responses to system disruptions to prevent widespread outages and security scares. Distribution and grid operations will benefit from new IT platforms that will make existing energy technology infrastructure more productive and lower-cost due to improved data analytics, process optimization, and intelligent communications systems. Exploration, production, distribution, and consumption will benefit by virtue of IT advances that bolster and coordinate information flows using sensors, pulses, measurements, and statistical analyses.

2. Finance
Several million people in the financial sector spend significant time on data entry and basic data manipulation that can be done by computers. Fraud and error-rates are high. Transparency is low. Few institutions know exactly what they own and entire banks face collapse because they cannot evaluate hidden risks. Indeed, many of the worst-run firms would have been destroyed by the latest financial collapse were it not for government intervention. Open platforms and superior technology that helps information, products, and services reach needy customers with the fewest middlemen will overtake these decaying institutions.

Consider the private wealth management space, where more than one million workers manually enter information on capital calls, distributions, K-1s, and other communications between financial parties. Given the predictable ontology of this type of information, systems should talk to each other directly rather than rely on expensive and error-prone human data entry. Given multiple currencies, different asset classes, and different financial product structures, family offices and large institutions manage only limited portfolio analysis. Companies like Addepar offer open platforms to increase transparency and improve analytics. Open platforms aggregate data on a massive scale, facilitating holistic portfolio views. They also allow application developers to address a multitude of specific problems, like options pricing or currency risk, providing long-term value to customers. Reducing opacity will have spillover benefits for the industry, reducing the potential for fraud and democratizing information that will empower families and small investors in comparison to large institutions.

3. Government
As in the financial industry, the government administration and security realms rely on closed platforms with slow back-office processes and excess manual data entry. Because market-based mechanisms are limited in government, disruptive technologies must be an order of magnitude better than established competitors and they must provide solutions on a grand scale where either lives or billions of dollars are at stake. These issues come together in defense, a place where Palantir Technologies has prospered by providing platforms that connect disparate databases and provide advanced analytics to improve intelligence and transparency.

Other areas of government, particularly in state and local administration, sacrifice hundreds of billions of dollars to poor accountability and fraud. New software platforms and technology solutions will address these areas, providing holistic solutions to improve accounting, data management, and interaction between and within agencies and stakeholders. Moreover, as the paradigm in government technology solutions shifts from service-created to COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf), solutions are more easily compared and the best technologies stand a better chance of dethroning old practices.

4. Health Care
The healthcare industry needs new technology platforms to share information and improve outcome analysis. Most high-level medical professionals still spend much of their time doing rote work. In fact, early electronic medical record (EMR) companies may have made things worse in healthcare in that doctors spend more time entering data and parsing details. Improved IT will free doctors and other professionals to deal with higher level conceptual work — the exceptions and unusual cases — while other forms of treatment and interaction will be pushed down and even automated.

Imagine a world in which a nurse works with a patient to enter in the patient’s key background information, and then a computer spits out a diagnosis: 87% chance the patient has the flu, 10% chance the patient has a certain type of fever, and 3% chance the patient has a more serious condition. The program may then cross-reference the patient against similar patients and ask the nurse additional questions missed in similar situations in the past. The computer compares the patient to others in the area and others across the world who, for example, had been pregnant recently and had a bad flu within the last three years. After this analysis, the computer spits a series of recommendations. A highly-trained doctor could review, modify, and approve the recommended steps. Eventually, doctors will attend to only the exceptional or unusual cases, the sort that require high-level conceptual ‘detective’ work. Companies presently work on technologies like this, and the savings will revolutionize over-strapped and under-resourced medical systems.

5. Education
As in healthcare, technology will allow educators to spend more time on high-level problems, such as research and curriculum development. Technology will also facilitate personalization. Companies following traditional enterprise models have failed in the education space, because good education requires engaging students at a conceptual level, on terms directly relevant to their interests. But software development has started to show capabilities in intelligent personalization that involves flexibly dealing with high-level context versus easily repeatable, well-defined processes.

Networks such as edModo, Shmoop, and Piazza have access to, and increase, collaboration among millions of teachers and students. Airy Labs, Ntelligent, and others use gamification to engage students in new ways. They also try to map the ontology of learning to enable personalized challenges that come from precisely measuring students’ skills. As these early efforts collect data, the technology will network to target and deliver content for each student. A technology-empowered educator will focus on a child’s weaknesses, while also gearing advanced study materials for her math prowess. These materials will interest her and engage her mind based on what she enjoys studying, say, nature, science fiction, and logic. Parents and educational institutions will pay substantial sums for technology that helps children excel in multiple aspects of their education.

The general trends in man-machine symbiosis apply. As with a doctor and patient in medicine, teachers will deal with exceptions and with iterative areas too complicated for computers to understand. The human touch will remain critical, and indeed increase in value, to complement the computer-aided educational experience. Presently, the industry suffers from weak infrastructure, incompetent IT support, and thin technology cultures. But as evidenced by initiatives at top universities to put classrooms online and by the growth of for-profit learning in general, these factors are changing. Professors and educators will focus on research, its applications, and training that requires hands-on instruction, while rote learning and numerous forms of basic instruction will be placed online or in modes of automation.

6. Media and Commerce
Media and commerce will continue radical change on the backs of companies that use technology to aggregate customers, disseminate virtual goods, improve in-app commerce, and provide access to local, personal, and real-time discounts and trends. The advertising domain shows a $50 billion dollar gap in the amount of time spent on a mobile device relative to the money spent on advertising. In entertainment, the avenues for expanding content are burgeoning–mobile entertainment grows near 20% per year and it’s expected to reach $54 billion by 2014. In retail, everything is changing. Between 1991 and 2001, U.S. retail growth maintained a 4–5 percent rate. Since Amazon.com turned its first profit in 2001, U.S. old-economy retail has grown only 1.2%, while online retail grew at close to 20% per year in the same period.

To see the reach of some of these trends, consider the impact on charity fundraising, which has been revolutionized by social networking and also mobile applications that allow for text-based donations. ONE HOPE, for example, enables charities to use its site for free to raise money with a modern point-based engine for supporters, and to use wine products as one way of doing so. Through its site, ONE HOPE gives wineries access to its national charitable networks and offer wine to millions for good causes. Charities get upside and consumers get upside; middlemen lose. With online wine sales growing steadily at over 35%, distributors and retailers should be scared. ONE HOPE even works with distributors to change the technology available to them and give them a better lock-in and value-add to retail locations with inventory management and a deal interface when it takes its brand offline.

This example speaks to the larger alcohol industry. Major distributors still reach retail and restaurants manually through face-to-face sales relationships. Distributors do not employ real-time inventory tracking and they do not use customer relationship management systems. Buyers regularly pay premiums given the inconvenience of comparative pricing. Software and enterprise platforms will remake this entire vertical, and many others like it from fashion to furniture.

IV. Navigating the Coming Transformation

To successfully navigate the coming transformation, investors must heed two important principles. First, risk-reward favors the valuable areas over the popular areas. Valuable areas include areas that remain nearly untouched by recent technology advances — massive old-line industries plagued by systemic problems and deep operational inefficiencies. Popular areas are areas in which a multitude of competitors fight for copycat victories in subsectors of industries already changed by technology and the success of companies like Amazon, Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.

To understand the popular areas to avoid, consider the areas in which the majority of talented young programmers work, such as communications, billing and payments, consumer investing, and gaming. Companies that garner attention in the press create copycat entrants, as is the case with social networking, deals sites, and local business analysis and support. To understand the valuable areas to seek out, consider the spaces still run by older executives uninfluenced by technology, like oil and gas, banking and financial services, government administration, medical practice and healthcare management, and secondary and higher education.

Along with investors, many technologists remained charmed by popular areas and choose to focus on first order problems, while failing to understand the back-end infrastructure and difficult applications of IT to business processes that make companies like Amazon successful. Investors and technologists often yearn to enable new ways for people to interact or see advertisements, but they ignore superior platforms in areas of industry like shipping or security or debt that will make the economy more efficient and solve hard global challenges.

The best entrepreneurs and investors will ask the right questions: What areas are worth billions of dollars and are important for our society, but do not currently employ advanced IT? What major areas of the economy are frustrating to work in when compared to how those areas should function?

Another important principle, and perhaps the least understood aspect of the coming transformation, is the critical element strong technology cultures. Running a business to take advantage of optimal processes enabled by advances in IT requires a meritocracy where engineers work for upside and control important parts of the company. Businesses frequently ignore or refuse to make this transition even as they are outcompeted and eliminated by new competition. Investors also fail to measure and appreciate the importance of this variable. An early-stage technology company not run by the most talented engineers has little chance of becoming a disruptive billion-dollar business. Many investors do not come from a top engineering culture and this will differentiate the elite.

The importance of a technology culture carries meaning at the macro level in addition to the corporate level. Although growth in U.S. markets may wane, the U.S. still produces the world’s best innovation because it maintains the best entrepreneurial ecosystems. Communities like Silicon Valley or Cambridge combine university research, funding, expertise, technology, and entrepreneurs in a swirling mix, valuing ideas over established hierarchies. These ecosystems will engender hundreds of new networks and platforms across global industries. On this scale, a technology culture represents the opposite of the mindset among the British aristocracy before the second industrial revolution. Wealth will not be “preserved” through “safe” investments. Technology cultures, well managed and fostered, will push expenditures on software, mobile, and Internet technologies to fill efficiency gaps in the old economy. And the creative destruction wrought by companies possessing the right mix of superior technology, market knowledge, cultural understanding, and execution will measure in the trillions of dollars.

As Henry Kissinger said: “History knows no resting places and no plateaus.” This applies to investing, where companies must create value and create it anew. The British aristocracy lost its wealth and power through complacency and a failure to adapt to coming change. America’s aristocracy will lose its wealth by virtue of a similar complacency and a similar failure to adapt to changes wrought by IT innovation. Many investors know that the world around them is changing, but they do not have the tools to translate that awareness into successful investments. A few investors, those most connected with the robust technology ecosystems that foment the changes and those best-versed in the hard and soft qualities that make an outstanding technology company, will understand the factors that expose an industry to disruptive technology. And those investors will create, and benefit from, these immense disparities.

Joe Lonsdale
Partner, 8VC
Founder, Palantir and Addepar

Zac Bookman
CEO, OpenGov
Advisor, 8VC

By the time that Alexander the Great’s armies had conquered most of the known world, it had become much harder to get the men to fight — even for one of the most talented and inspiring leaders that has ever lived. Brought up in the world’s leading martial culture, and having just conquered the rest of Greece under King Philip of Macedon, Alexander’s father, the soldiers were trained in the coordinated use of the giant pike sarissas, better battle organization and physical preparation, and possessed the unbridled spirit of free men. Their talent and advantages allowed them to sweep out of Greece and to cut through the Persian Empire and then anybody else in their path — whether they were liberating or enslaving is a matter of debate, but they believed they were liberators, as did Livy 300 years later. Only men inspired by a higher cause could have achieved so much.

But they were weighed down by their enormous success — proud officers soon squabbled and began to kill each other, and maneuvered for position. Trouble in the ranks began to occupy more and more of Alexander’s time. Not only the officers but the soldiers had become kings in their own right — their unprecedented success had brought even the lowliest Greek soldier hairdressers, weapons handlers, concubines, and other luxuries, and all the wealth they would ever need. It’s no wonder that the army rebelled against Alexander as he attempted to cross further into India, and forced him to turn back. They had had enough success, and the success had turned on itself. They had become too important to risk their own lives, or to suffer the outrageous indignities of a fierce battle.

Alexander the Great’s case is an extreme one, but our own Alexander and his officers are about to face the myriad problems of the early stages of success, and self-awareness and heading these issues off before and as they arise will be critical to taking what is currently an impressive start and pushing it squarely into the realms of glory that we are capable of achieving.

The Greeks had a saying — that the gods did not like men to think they were more than men, so when men started to succeed, the gods would send them pride, which would cause them to fail and to remain mortal. This failure would not be the fault of the great man — at some point, men are supposedly unable to resist pride, and the gods are always able to smash them down.

Pride comes in many forms and is expressed in a lot of ways. One common form of pride is the conviction that the rest of the world is incompetent and that only your way of doing things works, or only your unique skills are truly relevant.

At a hedge fund, for instance, one can imagine a successful group of traders who see the world from their own perspective having profited greatly from this for several years. Pride would quickly lead them to believe that most other people are unenlightened and are operating in a context that is virtually worthless by comparison. In a more extreme scenario, they might come to believe that virtually every other form of trading or even of making money in finance is stupid or worthless by comparison; as the pride becomes more extreme, virtually everything else becomes worthless by comparison and they begin to stop challenging their assumptions.

In a technology group, the pride of success leads insiders to believe that virtually every other technology in the space is worthless by comparison. This attitude slowly discourages questioning and challenging the internal technological processes and methodologies, and above all discourages questioning the basic assumptions and the framework of the approach. Although the initial assumption of massive superiority may be true at a given point in time, the attitude tends to stick, and long after a large government organization or corporation is no longer the best, it will continue to believe it is, and it will ignore outside technology, eventually to its massive detriment.

In a sales organization, pride is at least as great a threat as anywhere else. The sale closer is the rainman, and nothing would function without him, and everything he did to make it work was a stroke of unique genius and subtlety, much of it beyond the appreciation of the unwashed masses. Success further confirms the bias that other methodologies are naive, and probably useless. Everything else becomes useless other than the mantras and processes that have worked to date. A great salesman is an extremely valuable person, and a great sales manager is even more important. But in reality, depending on a variety of factors, sales could often have worked through any number of channels and methods, and are only one part of the business. But it is rare for the gods to allow the successful salesman to maintain perspective in the dizzying face of success. The flexibility, optionality, and 20,000 foot viewpoints that are vital to stop and consult along the way in tandem with the successful and disciplined sales methods are often pushed to the wayside, and other parts of the organization can easily become undervalued.

Meanwhile, it is easy to too quickly dismiss outsiders with different sales tactics that have proven successful in their own right but do not conform with the currently successful practices of the existing organization. Partners or new channels are discounted. “That is worthless” because it didn’t come from me becomes the default response, if not verbally then intellectually. In the face of massive success, anything a salesman is doing must be genius, and success will instinctively reinforce his idea that everybody else is a waste of time and that his methods are the best. It’s easy to apply this to mean that you should ignore everybody and everything else — especially if the success is continuing as you start to do this. But only by constantly learning and constantly challenging its assumptions can a sales organization achieve its full potential, just like any other human endeavor.

In a company that has an SV startup culture, success brings other challenges, and the introduction of liquidity is very dangerous — just as the introduction of riches to Alexander’s troops distracted them, so did it distract Google employees who became famous for “calling in rich.” A company must have a strong, spartan culture (all necessities and comforts provided by the organization and a devotion to the collective), especially during periods of rapid growth, if it is to survive the perils of liquidity. Meanwhile, cultural values are created and reinforced by the leaders. Alexander the Great kept discipline as long as possible by shaping and living his own life around his mission and his quest for glory, and his men knew it wasn’t just an act, it was truly his passion. He also made an effort to continue to shower generosity on his troops, not as a celebration of luxury, but as a celebration of their achievements and their dedication, with personalized gifts that may have been valuable in their own right but whose chief value came as recognition of their mutual dedication and respect. It was clear that he cared about what everybody was working on and about winning, not about enjoying the riches of achievement.

The leaders of the company should be on the same page about what they’re focused on and how their lifestyles and even the leisure activities that people know about reflect their values to the rest of the company. This is something they can help each other with. Especially as higher-ranked officers first begin to enjoy their success, it is easy to unwittingly take actions that suggest that success is something to be distracted by, or that engage in cultures such as New York models and parties, actions that are a bad influence on the mimetic desires of the troops and their shared focus on the mission.

Success tells you that everything about you and what you are doing must be great, and makes you less tolerant of negative feedback, less eager to search and improve yourself. But success comes from a myriad of inputs and has many more fathers than most realize — to continue to succeed you cannot take success personally. We are becoming more successful at our company, and the gods are already working on us. Of course they are, as we are human. But we can be orders of magnitude more successful than we are now — we should be. It will be a horrible failure if we are not. But if we do not constantly question ourselves and constantly recreate ourselves, if we do not tolerate other opinions and methods, if we do not catch ourselves when we look at how great we are and think that we deserve more respect, then the gods will succeed in tearing us down.

Pride costs us more than anything else and it is endemic to all of humanity. And success breeds a host of situations and influences that are mean-reverting, individually and culturally. As we begin to face off against true success, we must remain manically self-aware of its extraordinary challenge if we hope to continue to climb towards the gods.