 So, thank you. I don't think anyone's described me as epic before, except maybe my son, but I'm hopefully I'll manage to live up to that. So, as the host kind of kindly said, every year I do a presentation that tries to give some sort of set of ideas of how to think about what's happening in technology, what seems to be important, what the structures might be, maybe show some surprising charts. And so, this is this year's version. And I called it three steps to the future because it strikes me that very often this kind of three completely separate conversations going on in technology. There's a set of conversations around all the exciting stuff for 2025 or 2030, in particular, crypto. In fact, some people say if you're not, not only should you be all in on crypto, but you probably shouldn't be doing anything else if you work in venture at the moment. So, there's that conversation. But then meanwhile, there's all the companies that are actually being created and growing at the moment. And the companies that are in this room, this event, most of which are deploying the ideas that we've created in the last decade, rather than building something that will only work in 2030. And then there's all the other companies and all the other industries who are trying to catch up with ideas from 2000 or 2005. So, you have this kind of the stuff that will happen in the future, the stuff that's happening now, and the stuff that's catching up with things we were talking about and getting excited about in 2000 or 1995. And so, if I think about the first of these, the future, what is happening next, fairly obviously now, I think there's two sets of conversations around the future of tech. On the one hand, there's a conversation around Web 3 and Metaverse, and then the sort of everything else, everything from quantum to satellites to plant-based meat or drones or EVs. That's all kind of in the MISC and other section, while all the huge amount of the excitement now is around Web 3 and Metaverse. The funny thing about the terms both Web 3 and Metaverse is there was sort of a rebranding that happened this summer. Previously, we called them cryptocurrencies and we called them AR and VR. But coming up with a new name is also sort of a reconceptualisation, a kind of a reimagining of what it is that you're really trying to do, and a way of stepping up to express actually a rather broader vision of what this stuff might be. Cryptocurrencies aren't just about speculation and digital gold or even about DeFi. VR and AR isn't just about games or headsets, it's about something much broader. So if we look first at thinking about how we might understand Web 3, I've always kind of liked this quote from Voltaire who said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an empire. And the reason I use this is that if you say cryptocurrency, well, it's not really about cryptography and it's not only about a currency, it's not secret. If you say blockchain, that sort of implies it's a database. And so there's always been this kind of struggle of, well, what do you even call this? Or what would a set of terminology be that would actually explain what you're trying to do? And Web 3 is sort of the best attempt so far at encapsulating that in that, you know, we know we had the web and then the idea of web 2.0 in 2005 was saying, well, we're moving from companies creating the content to all of us creating the content. And so that gets you YouTube and Facebook, but it also gets you Yelp and Zillow and it gets you networks and federation, distribution, APIs, RSS, all sorts of stuff, some of which stuck, some of which didn't. But it was a shift in who was creating the content, not in who was making money from it or controlling it. And so then the concept of Web 3 is actually now it's the users themselves who control these systems, that these networks become distributed open computing systems, as opposed to all of us publishing something onto a closed system like Facebook or Twitter. This is also, of course, open source 2.0. Open source, we had open distributed code creation, but it was run in private inside a software company or inside your own computer. Then we went to Web and SAS, which are all powered by open source. But again, even though Google runs on open source, you can't see the code as it's running. And so, but then with Web 3, we have a distributed computing system. So not only is the source code open, but the computer is open, that we can see the code running. And we have a revenue model built in which open source never had. This is all tremendously exciting, intoxicating, sort of messianic, millenarian, religious, a lot like early open source, a lot like the early internet. And of course, we're going to solve all of the old problems. And of course, we won't possibly have all sorts of new problems or just express those problems in exciting new ways. All of that has got us to some very, very exciting market caps. That's probably the thing that gets people most excited. You know, something over a trillion dollars of Bitcoin, half a trillion dollars of Ethereum. And this stuff is now broken well out beyond the kind of people who come to conferences like this. People at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and UBS think, oh, actually maybe crypto assets might be viable as a store of value. So kind of the V1 use case for Bitcoin has now kind of reached the mainstream and become something that people take entirely seriously. The more interesting question, if you're actually in the software business is, well, how would you go beyond just a store of value? And how would you create software? And how much of that is actually happening so far? And here the numbers shift to the kind of small but very exciting rather than big but very exciting. I think if you told somebody in 2010 that the hottest thing in the tech industry had 200,000 registered users, they would think that was a type A for 200 million. But of course, that's one of the ways that this becomes interesting, that scarcity becomes important. And so I think, again, most people in this room will know what an NFT is and have been looking at these prices and looking at the user numbers here. I think the important thing to understand here is that on the one hand, yes, there is no actual conceptual problem with the idea of sort of digital items as art or digital items as property. The absolute numbers are tiny, but this doesn't actually have to be about art. Rather, this is about ways of owning building blocks, ways of owning primitives, ways of owning indeed pieces of the internet. My former colleague at Andreessen Horitz, Chris Dixon said NFTs mean you can own a piece of the internet. And had a thousand people from web two companies screaming at him and saying he was an idiot. But this is a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about what you're doing, just as you can buy a domain name, you can buy a piece of content or you can buy an item or you can buy an address on this system. Stepping away from very frosty things like that, there's also a bunch of other places where we have exciting, interesting incentive structures, something like Helium, which creates an incentive structure to distribute a wireless network, has got, again, a very nice adoption curve. But what we also have to wonder when we look at all of these things is to try and understand what we're looking at. So does a market cap tell me that it's working? Well, for a normal company, no, it doesn't. It tells us people think it's working. Does a market cap for a crypto system tell me that it's working? Well, sort of yes and sort of no. If everybody is buying it because it's going up and the early members use it as a cashing out, is that a Ponzi scheme? Well, maybe, but that's also how art or currencies or social networks work. And so we have these sort of confounding questions with all the noise and hype and sort of irrational criticism as we try and kind of peel through all of that and understand what we're actually looking at. I think the fairest way to look at all of this is to think about how early it is, how exciting but also how early. You still need deep technical knowledge. It's still very fragmented. It's massive creative energy. Also, sort of huge uncertainty as to what this will look like in 2030. And I think a good way of illustrating that is this question. Is an iPhone open or closed? Well, it's full of open source software, open source one. And yet most people would say that the iPhone is a closed platform. And yet it has millions of apps and billions of downloads. So in what senses exactly is it closed? And in what senses is it open? Where exactly do things like open or decentralized get applied at what layers in the stack and with what kinds of leverage? That's kind of the question for Web 3 for the next decade. Some of the same issues apply to Metaverse. Again, it's a sense of a vision of something different. That VR and AR are not games consoles. They become the next universal device after smartphones. The games themselves become much broader, much general. But VR and AR become much more general beyond games. And if you're wearing one of these screens all the time every day, what would that mean? Well, it's not about seeing Excel windows floating in front of you. It's about self-expression, identity and place and popular culture. Another way to look at this is it's kind of a mood board for the future. So in the early 90s, if you said what's going to happen next in technology, you would have made a list of words and you'd have written the words on a whiteboard. And then you call that list information superhighway. And some of those things happened, but not really like that. We are all using interactive multimedia over broadband networks today, but it's not all controlled by Disney and AT&T and Bertelsman. The same thing now with Metaverse. You can write all those words on a whiteboard and draw a box around it and say Metaverse. It doesn't follow that it's all going to get built by Facebook or it'll all work like that. How much is this happening yet? Again, very early. Facebook has sold 10 million Oculus Quest, which is not an insignificant number, but it didn't surge in lockdown. And it's still, as a piece of popular consciousness, still much smaller than something like Roblox. Roblox gets people very excited in a more generalized way about how games might be evolving. Because it seems to be taking us beyond the model of the high definition, high graphics, violent first person shooter that's basically dominated the high end of the games industry for the last 10 years. Gets us to something that's more about self-expression and social, something that's an ecosystem. So something that might actually become a platform and have some longevity rather than kind of flaming out like games tend to do. But then I think one still has to step back and say, yes, games are very exciting, but games remain really small as a portion of the tech industry. More people use Snapchat every day than own a games console. More people use Snapchat than play any of the big smartphone games. Fortnite has 40 million daily active users. Snap has 300 million daily active users. Now that is changing or perhaps it's changing. The revenue has certainly changed and mobile created a much bigger market for games than we had in the past. But we're still kind of trying to work out, well, this is a thesis. This is not a certainty. Our game is going to become much more universal. Will everybody be wearing AR and VR glasses and playing with those devices? And one argument would be it's just Moore's law and engineering and progress. This stuff will get much better and everybody will use it. That is after all what happened with mobile phones and smartphones. The problem is that's not what happened with games consoles, which did get radically better, radically faster, radically cheaper and yet that's 200 million people, not a universal product. So if we think about what these kinds of trends might mean in 2030, there is a strong scound of tech determinism. You look at something and you say this is amazing, it must be part of the future. And that was certainly true for the internet or the web or open source or smartphones. This is amazing, it must be part of the future. There's also a bunch of stuff where that didn't quite happen in that way. And so as we look at these things we can be very sure that these are important. The question is well what do they go, how important and in what ways and how long will it take and what will they look like? This is a how long will it take chart. People were very very excited about the mobile internet in 2000. It took a decade indeed arguably it took 15 years for it to actually happen. So the future can take quite a lot longer than you expect. You can have a winter or two on the way. This is interest in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Very very exciting and then they didn't fucking work. So everyone had to give up for a decade and then come back. We may have another VR winter or indeed another AI winter. But fundamentally nobody knows anything. So this is a diagram of the internet from 1994. Nobody knew what this was going to be. We didn't know it was just going to be the internet. We also didn't know what that the internet was only going to be the web. And we certainly didn't know what the web was going to be. The original web browser from Tim Berners-Lee had an editor built in because he thought it was kind of a document system as opposed to a publishing system. The only thing that kind of does seem clear is that more and more these technologies become about identity and self expression and place and self and popular culture and less and less about technology per se. That we shift to thinking about how we use them and how we make them part of our lives. So there is the dream for the future. There is also everything that's being built now. And actually most of the great companies that I see these days are deploying all the great ideas that we've had in the last decade. And I think that kind of the best way of describing that is this phrase digital transformation which to me always sounds kind of like a parody of marketing bullshit. It's something that you would see on a billboard for an enterprise software company in an airport. Like you know we will help you with your transformational digital global influencing. Thank you very much. But what this actually means is that in the 80s all these big companies moved from mainframes to client server and now they're all moving from client server to cloud and SaaS and machine learning and that's kind of a generational change in how the software industry functions. If you come from the tech industry or Silicon Valley you probably might think that cloud is kind of old and boring and done. That was a story from ten years ago. Actually it's only just started. Only sort of 10-15 percent of enterprise software was actually moved. And old paradigms last a really long time. This is IBM's install base of mainframes. IBM shipped record mainframe capacity in the year 2020. So the old model can last a really, really long time and the mainframes are still out there doing the old stuff. They're just not being used to do the new stuff. That transition of course gets us to some really punchy numbers for capex for this great phrase hyperscalers. So alphabet and Microsoft will spend about 40-45 billion dollars on cloud capex this year. But it's more interesting than just the kind of the cloud itself is what that means. And fundamentally it means radically more software. Orders of magnitude more software. Because the ability to deploy software when you go to the cloud, when you go to SaaS, becomes so much easier that you unlock so many more opportunities and so many more kinds of business. This is an analysis from Okta of how much software their customers have that is actually connected into Okta. So this is just the people who know how much. This is just the software they know about. In the broader company, big companies are now seeing anything sort of three, four, five hundred applications being used across the company. And that just wasn't possible in the client server days. Cloud and SaaS make that possible. This is an illustration of what that transition kind of means. Vodafone, the world's biggest mobile phone operator, has two and a half million invoices a year. Forty thousand queries. A thousand people in a building somewhere processing all of those. What would you do to that with modern software? What would you do to that with machine learning and with cloud and SaaS? That's kind of what digital transformation means. What it also means is you don't just take your spreadsheets and put them in the cloud. You don't take your bug tracking list and put it in, from Excel and put it in Google Sheets. You don't put your list of fixes to your design from Excel and put it in Google Sheets. You move it to a piece of software that actually encapsulates that workflow. My favorite example of this is frame.io which was bought by Adobe earlier this year. This is a workflow tool for professional video. It replaces email, Slack and Google Sheets. This is basically an idea from 2005. It's basically Google Docs but for video. But it took that long for the opportunity, the market, the technology and the right entrepreneur to come along and change it. As I said here, this is an idea from 2005. And so what's happening now is sort of mass deployment of all the great stuff that was invented in the tech industry in the last five, 10, 20 years and all the new companies that can be created. Another great example of this is Shopify which did $160 billion of GMV in the last 12 months. So there is the stuff that we're building. Then there is everybody else desperately trying to catch up. And this is kind of an analysis I think you could have done in about 1995. All the old value chains break apart. You get all kinds of new models and new entrants and you get new gatekeepers and you get new winners. The question is how long it takes. So this is a transition of various media industries in the US. It doesn't all happen at once. Different industries get hit at different times. They also move faster and slower. E-commerce has taken a lot longer to shift to something like books or newspapers. But I think the general sort of transition that we're seeing here is everything that the internet did to media or newspapers is now happening to everything else, now happening to every other industry. This is what's happened to TV. This always reminds me of the Hemingway line. How did you go bankrupt? Well, gradually and then suddenly the US pay TV subscription is now down by a third from the peak, probably passing Netflix sometime anytime now. And this is a great quote from CEO of Warner's is worrying about Netflix. He's like worrying about the Albanian army. That was not a great prediction in hindsight given that Netflix now has a bigger content budget than Warner's. The other interesting thing on this chart, incidentally, is that all of those companies, many of these companies are spending more than basically all of the major European broadcasting markets combined. Netflix spends more than the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined on commissioning new content. That kind of poses a problem. And this is kind of a generalised issue that companies that were previously big fish in small ponds become false small fish in big ponds. In the UK, 16 to 24 watch more Netflix and prime than everything from all the UK broadcasters combined, both live and catch up and recorded. And the same thing for YouTube. And then the TV itself becomes a battleground. Maybe we'll kind of forget that Apple announced the Apple TV and the iPhone in the same event. And one of those became kind of a big deal. And the other ones sort of disappeared without trace. Here we are a decade over a decade later, suddenly TV has become important again. And so again, we have ideas from 10, 15 years ago that have suddenly become relevant. Who launched in 2007, it took until 2020 for Disney Plus actually to launch and start changing how the market functioned. Many of the same things are happening in retail. We've seen very obviously a surge in retail adoption in the pandemic, much more so in much less so in the US actually than in a lot of other places. And it's kind of important to remember how unevenly distributed this is. 80% of people in Britain by online regularly, but only about a third of Italians. So you have this kind of a wide distribution of how far people are living in this present. It's also very widely spread within industries. So in the UK online grocery doubled from 5% to 10%. Retail excluding grocery on the other hand is now at 40% of all UK retailing. And so if one digs into that, you have this kind of interesting spread. It's no longer what categories will people buy online, but now how will they buy them online? You'll buy anything online, but does that come through the mail or do you have to collect it or does it need to be delivered? Or does it need to come to you from a kid on a moped which is as a restaurant delivery model? All of that drives new logistics models. Amazon now delivers 20% of all US parcels itself. It's bigger than UPS on track to be bigger than FedEx. And that's not terribly surprising because Amazon is now on track to be the world's largest retailer. Amazon GMV is probably already to overtake Walmart. Amazon revenue overall revenue will probably overtake Walmart in the next couple of years. And Amazon is leveraging that platform. Amazon now has a line in its account called Advertising, called Other Predominantly Advertising, which was $30 billion in the last 12 months. Amazon probably has a $25 billion ad budget that's probably producing more cash flow than AWS. It's also incidentally bigger than all the advertising for all the newspapers on Earth which are $25 to $30 billion. But of course Amazon itself is now being unbundled. I mentioned Shopify earlier. Here is Shopify compared to Amazon. It's now 45% that Shopify is now 45% of the size of Amazon Marketplace on track to overtake Amazon first party sales sometime in the next year or two if nothing changes. And of course Shopify itself has this kind of really interesting symbiotic relationship with Facebook which takes us to this chart. There's a kind of there's an old English joke about irregular verbs. So conjugate the verb personalize. I personalize, you track, they violate fundamental human rights. Facebook, Apple personalizes Google tracks, Facebook violates fundamental human rights. No, we're not like them at all. And so you get these really interesting platform conflicts and of course competition and regulation conflicts in that. And that what's at stake underneath all of that meanwhile is that when you change your channel you change what gets bought. So when you go online you don't buy all the same stuff. You buy fundamentally different things going online shifts the position of brands shifts what gets what's being bought. That becomes a major channel for big brands. Some of them are dealing with that much more successfully than others. And it also creates opportunities. So I don't know how many people have noticed Sheehan creeping up the App Store charts on Google Trends. It's now bigger than H&M on Zara on surveys of American teenagers. It's now the second most popular online retailer in total after Amazon. And if you look at purchasing it data Sheehan is now probably the biggest fast fashion retailer in the USA. It's probably overtaken H&M and Zara doing that entirely on a smartphone entirely with a completely new kind of mobile digital first experience. Of course, all of this has happened before. The idea of a new retail concept breaking into a market is nothing new. It happened before with superstores. Indeed it happened with department stores in the 19th century, which will once the Amazon of their time. What's happening now, I think, is as much about retailing as it is about technology. This is Topshop, which is a major mass market fashion chain in the UK, which went bankrupt. And they went bankrupt because they didn't adapt partly because of the pandemic, but mostly because they didn't adapt to a new kind of retailing. It wasn't really that they didn't get tech. It was technology created a new sort of channel that they weren't able to adapt to. This is an example from another industry. How many taps does it take to open an account on a smartphone app? Guess which one of these are the native of the smartphone only company and which one of the ones of these are the legacy businesses? Again, is this about technology or is this about retail bankers being good at a new channel? I kind of generalize the problem here. What is it that you're trying to do? Anyone in retail, brand, marketing, advertising, TV? What anyone's trying to do is say, what's the logistics? How does my customer get the product? And what's the discovery? How does somebody know that it exists? And you have these pools of capital of hundreds of billions of dollars that used all to be separate, but now they all merge into one. In the past, you would have never have said should we open stores in that country or just advertise because that wasn't a question that made sense. But now all of those merge into one question and they become one pool of spending one set of ways for a company to reach its customers. Going back again to department stores, this is Selfridges in London back in about 1920 and the reason I've used this picture is at that point they hadn't managed to buy all the properties in the block. There were still a few holdouts. This was when department stores were Amazon. And so what we're seeing now over and over is just kind of a rerun of the kinds of questions that people ask in retailing or in TV or in marketing or in advertising or brands or consumer products every five, 10, 15, 20 years here is a completely new channel. Here is a new kind of consumer behaviour. How do we adapt to that? So we think about some conclusions here. There's lots of things I haven't talked about. If one was going to give a kind of a universal theory of technology, one would probably try and mention all of these. And I've come partly for space, partly for other reasons I haven't. What I've done instead is think, well, what is it that technology is changing about the economy we live in and how are we adapting to that? This is the first of the industries to be overturned by technology, the music industry, which I haven't mentioned so far. And as you can see, it's actually been growing for the last five years, although it's still only about half of the peak back in 2000. But I think it's really interesting to compare music to some other industries. So the entire global recorded music industry is smaller than Netflix. It's also smaller than Apple's platform rent. So if you take App Store Commissions and Google's payment to be the default search engine on the iPhone, that's more money than the music industry and it's also more money than Netflix. You zoom out again, take Apple's service business and its accessories business, that's $100 billion. So it's five times the size of the music business. And we zoom out again, do we really think that Apple cares very much about music or TV, except as a small check box feature to have on the device? I think in general, what's happened here is that the tech industry changes industries and then moves on to other opportunities. So we changed music. That was not a very big industry. Then comes advertising and marketing, that's a trillion dollar industry. Then comes retailing, which is a 20 trillion dollar industry. Then consumer spending, which is more like a 50 trillion dollar industry. And so the tech industry moves on from those other smaller things and doesn't think about them anymore. Because all the questions in music now are music questions. All the questions in advertising, all the questions in retailing are probably going to end up being retailing questions. Now that 50 trillion dollars, that size of those opportunities has prompted some pretty unprecedented investment in technology, I think most people in the room would be aware that this is kind of a hot market for investing in start-ups at the moment. Now as the slide says unprecedented, this isn't literally unprecedented, but we are now back at the levels of investment that we saw in the dot-com bubble. Of course, the difference then is that there were 100 million PCs on earth and now there's five billion smartphones. So then it was all about the promise of the future. Now it's all kind of about the reality of what we're building. That obviously makes a little bit, it causes a little bit of uncertainty around the edges. Not entirely sure that 100 million dollar seed rounds are going to end particularly well. I'm also not entirely sure that Tesla is going to create more value than the entire existing auto industry, which is what its current market valuation implies. In the end, if you're selling roughly the same product at roughly the same price and the same margin to roughly the same number of people, you're kind of unlikely to have doubled the size of the market, but you know, we'll see. But I think if one goes up to kind of the really the high level of what's happening here, the technology industry has gone through these sort of waves of sort of 15-year generational changes. We had mainframes and then PCs and then the web and then smartphones and now the generational changes that technology becomes sort of a systemic part of society. It becomes part of everything in every company and everything that we do. Now, this is a nice illustration of what happened the last time we did this. This is the cover of the Sears Webuck annual report from 1960. And what you see here is a company that's tremendously proud of car culture. They think this is great. I think today we'd look at that and see a sort of dystopian hellscape. But at the time, they thought there was so fantastic they commissioned somebody to paint a picture of it and put it on the cover of their annual report. But there's a bunch of interesting things going on here because first of all, we see the reconfiguration of a country around mass car ownership and the reconfiguration of retailing around mass car ownership. This is what happens when everyone has a car. And so I think you could say that the car industry created far more millionaires in real estate and retail than it did in the actual car industry because making cars is one business but remaking the whole economy around the fact that everybody has a car is a much bigger business. That's what gets you to this picture here from Sears, which is not a car company. It's also, of course, what gets you to Walmart, which became a vastly bigger business than Sears because Walmart became much better at mastering this new channel than Sears. The irony of Sears, incidentally, is that Sears began as a mail order catalog. So Sears Robuck was one of the original mail order catalogs in the 19th century. So it really was almost literally the Amazon as a 19th century. And as that model evolved, it slowly moved away from catalogs and moved into physical retail. It moved into department stores. It moved into malls. It moved into things like this, which is also an interesting symmetry with what Amazon is doing, given suggestions that Amazon wants to open 250 grocery stores or supermarkets in the UK in the course of the next couple of years. Amazon is basically following the path of Sears Robuck. But the thing that I think that sits underneath all of this is that these were not car companies. That what Sears Robuck was not a car company or a railway company. That Walmart was not a car company or a trucking company. There were companies that were built on that possibility and built on the ways that all of those things have changed the economy. And I think what's happening increasingly now is that the tech industry goes off and builds technology things and changes the rest of the world. And then in the rest of the world, companies like Sears and Walmart get built as a consequence of everything that the tech and technology industry had done. So with that, I have two minutes and nine seconds left. So I will give you back that for your day. Thank you.