Economic upheavals are more akin to droughts than meteorite strikes; they tend to be regular occurrences common across decades and reflect a cycle rather than random catastrophic events (although if we lived long enough, meteorite strikes might feel much the same!) 

There were no iPhones loose in the world before June 2007. None. And no Androids either until a year later. Until Apple dropped the first version of its now ubiquitous phone, the best user experience you could hope for was Blackberry’s graphical user interface, gnarly keyboard, and form factor that while sleek, curvy and blue, would barely fit into a t-shirt pocket. 

The pandemic made them look like superstars. With travel-loving Antipodean consumers locked up at home for months on end, and restrictions on how far they could move from their homes (for example, only 5 km in New South Wales and basically nowhere in Auckland!), consumers headed for the keyboard and engaged in an orgy of online spending.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.