Fix broken systems, Repair human damage

Thomas Rory Stone, Ph.D.
5 min readDec 19, 2021

The education of the millennial generation — the most educated demographic of all time — has not resulted in as much tangible reward as you might expect.

From California to Japan, Europe to Australia, millennials top the charts on measures of college degrees and technological competence. Even in the United States, which provides the most opportunities to young people, incomes for college graduates have been stagnant since 2001, with the exception of those who work at hi-tec startups and top firms in Silicon Valley.

“Everything I’ve worked for… has all been preparation for a future that no longer exists.”

That quote comes from a disaster movie (The Day After Tomorrow, where an apocalyptic snowstorm engulfs New York City and brings life to a halt). But for millennials who aren’t graduates, today’s economic picture is even worse.

It shouldn’t be this way. And economically speaking — hell, morally speaking — it can’t be this way.

The success of the internet economy points to a clear roadmap for channelling the contributions of millennials into economic growth. The 2020s are full of expensive problems — coronavirus, the climate crisis, and a strained safety net — that can only be solved by a surge in new wealth creation.

That’s where we’re focused. We think it’s important, and we think that too few organisations are giving serious enough attention to this slice of the future.

Instant messaging was once a toy; today it powers the workplace.

The streets and neighbourhoods of Grand Theft Auto 5 are being used as testbeds to train the next generation of self-driving cars.

The culture of today’s kids is the leading indicator of tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

The somewhat bleak world of the early 2020s can feel like a vertiginous drop for a generation that remembers first the 1990s. But even more jarring is the difference in functionality between the “real world” and the “online world”.

Today’s virtual sphere comes close to matching its real-world counterpart for every purpose including running a business, communicating with friends and colleagues, and participating in politics. (During the COVID-19 crisis, the drop in productivity from moving almost all professional work online, was only around 20%.)

But on top of replicating the functionality of the real world, there is one crucial aspect where the virtual sphere is far ahead: it is much easier to change.

Changing the world has never been easy.

For most of human history, it was the preserve of a small elite. Even in modern democratic societies, ones that make room for ordinary citizens to take part in political action or entrepreneurial efforts, leaving your mark on the world is difficult. Often it requires you to be the leader or very high up in an organisation, and even then it can take years of dedicated effort before an idea has a hope of being widely adopted.

The internet makes things much simpler.

As so much of the online world is written in code, changing it could be as easy as uploading an update to a video game. Let’s remember with great power comes great responsibility. At large tech companies, software developers can see their ideas make it halfway across the world in the span of a few minutes — for example an update algorithm used to control ridesharing in a different city could have a tangible effect on the traffic, or you know, the results of the UK referendum on Brexit...

This ease of change is what makes technology-first companies rich. Research on “intangible capital” strongly suggests that the high salaries at big tech companies are a direct result of infrastructure that allows them to rapidly update the world around them.

In Japanese philosophy, “kintsugi” means to repair with an awareness of imperfection and a history of breakage. It’s a style of art, putting broken objects back together with the fault lines emblazoned in gold — and also of aesthetics more broadly. For entrepreneurs attempting to repair our troubled world, kintsugi is a philosophy to live by.

Even the most open societies and free countries are not nearly as malleable as the one that is being built today online. Until now, participation in the public sphere, whether business, journalism or politics, has been highly limited through laws, organisations and governments.

The promise of the internet is for the opportunity to repair the world, to be open to many.

Venture capital, or to use its original name, “adventure capital”, was created to harness the transformative efforts of entrepreneurs, also manage the resulting volatility. Repairing our world seems like a big project, but the returns could be enormous.

According to The Economist, considering one measure of the cleverness of institutions — “rule of law” — a one standard deviation increase, through a software upgrade, could triple world GDP.

We will only spot those opportunities by paying attention to the generation who are already living in the future, desperate to escape from under the thumb of yesterday’s legacy systems.

Let’s not forget that if we get it right…

We can fix our broken systems, repair human damage and come out the other side to a future that is golden.

If you are a founder or investor and this resonates then get in touch with Thomas and Jos.

A massive thank you to the author of the Mom Test and long time friend Rob Fitzpatrick, my Mum for copyediting and mostly Saku Panditharatne, a beautiful mind, writer and soul who wrote most of the above — at least all the good bits.

Welcome to the (Ad)venture™

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Thomas Rory Stone, Ph.D.

Founding Partner @kintsugiad . Previously Partner @AIseedVC , Lecturer @UCL , Co-founder @PredictionIO (Acquired by Salesforce) and Ph.D. @UCLCS