One of tech’s biggest news stories coming out of 2021 would be Facebook’s rebrand to “Meta.” Like Google, it’s likely that nobody will adhere to that new name, but everyone sure took note of the strategic direction change towards the metaverse. The Web 3.0 / creator economy / DiFi crowd quickly attached themselves to the theme, and everyone had a good group wank on Twitter over what visionaries they are. Truth be told, the metaverse is an idea that’s been around for decades.
Let’s get back to basics for a moment. Four years ago, we published a piece titled How to Invest in the Singularity – It’s Near which summarized a keynote given by Masayoshi Son, CEO and Founder of SoftBank, about the importance of ARM.
The metaverse we want to invest in is exactly that. It’s the same vision that Jensen Huang of NVIDIAhas – one built from scratch where the physical world is connected to the virtual world. All these IoT chips and sensors are turning our entire planet into a digital twin – a metaverse.
Then there’s Facebook’s vision of everyone going into a virtual reality (VR) world where they show off their NFTs and desperately try not to offend anyone.
Digital twins produce a tremendous amount of big data exhaust that can be analyzed for insights. The old factoid, ” 90% percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years” is probably equally true today as the volume of data being produced has exploded and will continue to in the coming years.
It’s why Warren Buffet set aside his aversion to tech stocks and invested in Snowflake, a cloud-based data management platform that helps companies do more with less. Such a value proposition will sell equally well in times of economic turmoil, and investors have clamored on board. The stock remains extremely overvalued – probably for good reason – and now has a market capitalization of over $100 billion.
We won’t invest in any firm with a simple valuation ratio over 40, no matter how grand the value proposition might be. We might never be able to invest in Snowflake, but we’re fine with that, especially when there are other big data companies out there we might find equally compelling. One area that sparked our interest is real-time data analytics, something that’s particularly applicable to “the metaverse.”
How do tech visionaries stay relevant when technologies change so quickly? Two reasons. First, they learn exceptionally fast. Back in the day, rock star programmers could fake it until they made it by learning languages and platforms at the speed of projects. Second, some things don’t change. More processing power and lower latency are always desirable attributes. NVIDIA (NVDA) became the biggest semiconductor company in the world because they built better processors. As for latency, it all comes down to one thing. How fast can we analyze the big data exhaust spewing forth from our growing population of digital twins? One answer is two words – Apache Kafka.
Web 3.0 wankers are always droning on about how decentralized autonomous organizations DAOs are the future. ConstitutionDAO was supposed to show the world this grand vision of technological socialism, but it only managed to burn millions in gas fees and fail miserably at what it set out to do. Truth be told, the DAO ethos has been around for a while. It’s called opensource software. Developers have a special place in their hearts for a technology that is shared in a community where everyone works to make it better.
