After a two-year pandemic-fuelled boom, retail eCommerce companies across the world have experienced what researchers at Insider Intelligence and eMarketer characterise as “precipitous deceleration.”
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ChatGPT is already transforming the world. In this month’s newsletter we explore the duality - the yin and yang - of generative AI, while asking if it is ushering in the next tech bubble.
(Image by Dall-E 2: “a painting in the style of Picasso depicting the rise of generative AI”).
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ChatGPT has kicked off a digital arms race, but it’s only the first shot in the huge generative AI disruption that is coming behind it.
Founded in 2004, Facebook took a year to reach a million users. Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for a billion dollars, took two took and a half months.
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That didn’t take long. Within weeks of the launch of ChatGPT, as people started to appreciate that the long-awaited AI inflection may have finally dawned, the warnings began.
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2022 may have delivered unprecedented challenges – even for the most battle-scarred of investors – but it’s important to put this year’s Tech meltdown into longer term context. While the circumstances might be extraordinary, some of the outcomes are remarkably familiar.
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Conventional logic is that black swan events are rare and infrequent, cannot be predicted (although they seem obvious in hindsight), and affect markets severely.
2022 seems to have delivered its fair share of rare, hard-to-predict and disruptive events. Whether or not they were black swan events, the cumulative effect has been devastating to many.
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As the bells start to jingle and the Auld Lang starts to Syne it’s time to lack back at the year, through the blunt and irrefutable lens on the data.
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History will record this as the time when some of the tech giants started mass layoffs, when quarterly results stumbled, when FTX failed and when Twitter changed hands.
Such turmoil! Yet entrepreneurs and investors are still remarkably positive in selected verticals. One of those is Logistics and Supply Chain. Dive in with us.
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COVID, the war in Europe, threats of war on Taiwan and longer-term structural changes such as the shift to e-commerce and the drive to build more sustainable and digitised supply chains have created challenges for logistics providers around the world.
But it has also created the opportunity for entrepreneurs to use technology to tackle these problems bringing an influx of investment into the sector.
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Investments in logistics businesses have grown sharply during the pandemic years, with McKinsey and Co for instance, saying funding for startups in the sector almost doubled between 2020 and 2021.
Some of those investments have been huge, such as the US$935 million secured by US based Flexport, at the start of this year. Others, such as the seed funding for visual logistics business SpaceDraft reflect the nascent aspect of the opportunity they are chasing.
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Mountain towns around the world transformed into hot beds of tech during the pandemic, as distributed workforces found their way there in search of fresh air and a healthier environment. At North Ridge Partners we’ve been studying successful tech mountain towns like Boulder, Colorado and Bend, Oregon in our quest to help Queenstown - our spiritual home in the Southern Alps of New Zealand - to build out its own tech ecosystem.
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North Ridge Partners’ interest in this subject is more than academic. We’ve assembled a team of likeminded entrepreneurs, tech companies, the Government and local university to conceptualise a long-term economic transformation for Queenstown, New Zealand.
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The communities of Boulder, Colorado and Bend, Oregon share some important qualities. They are both mountain towns with well-developed tech ecosystems. We studied them to work out how to apply their lessons to Queenstown.
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Cybersecurity has rocketed towards the top of many risk registries, and IT spending to secure networks, data and systems is growing strongly. That’s good news for cybersecurity vendors and provides ample opportunities for investors in a sector where valuations have already significantly retreated along with the wider tech category
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Cybercrime, increasingly including nation-state attacks, costs businesses and the community upwards of US$440bn a year, according to McAfee, and the problem is getting worse.
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The move by chip manufacturer Broadcom to acquire VMware — the business that famously popularised virtualisation and led to the rise of cloud computing — in May 2022, caught the market by surprise for two reasons.
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Sovereign states, and even corporations, are pondering the first heavy industrial-scale conflict in Europe since the middle of the 20th Century and some of the questions are being answered far from the trenches … in space. C'est la guerre.
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Sovereign states – and even corporations – are pondering the first heavy industrial-scale conflict in Europe since the middle of the 20th Century and some of the questions are being answered far from the trenches.
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The growing focus on defence capabilities in space is likely to be a boon for many participants in the sector. Here are three companies set to benefit.
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Software may be eating the planet, but today there’s widespread indigestion. After a multi-year tear, software company multiples have given back gains. Profitability is now back in vogue, with value investors finally smiling, as growth investors cringe.
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