 In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote an essay called 50 Years Hence. In it, he predicts nuclear power, cellular telephony, genetic engineering, and even clean meat. That is growing meat without the animals. Something that's just coming to fruition now. He also talks about how, because the pace of technological change is advancing so rapidly, it's more important than ever that people take a principled approach to their work. This was a call to arms, but not one of Winston's normal cries to fight the Nazis. This was a call to use deep technology to solve some of the world's biggest problems. And while the rhetoric might not soar as high as Winston's speech in the House of Commons during World War II, we shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender. This essay is even more inspiring. And it's more inspiring because today the greatest dangers aren't our opponents on the battlefields, but things like climate change, malnutrition, and disease. This is a graphical representation of the number of people that die in war in the modern age. Proportionally represented, this is the number of people that die from murder. The number of people that die from transportation accidents, musculoskeletal disorders, diabetes, non-transport accidents, infections, kidney disorders, digestive disorders, nervous system disorders, respiratory disorders, cancer, and heart and circulatory disorders. This is just a comparison between the number of people that die from heart and circulatory disorders and that die from war and murder. But I want you to ask yourself, what have you heard about more on the news recently? Heart and circulatory disorders or murder and war? It used to make sense to focus on war and murder because those were things you could do something about, whereas some of those other causes of death were not. But times have changed. Using deep technology, we can now solve some of those great challenges and many more. Now is the time for Winston's vision in 50 years hence. And this is why with my co-founder, Ella Made, we founded 50 years. 50 years is an early stage venture capital fund based in Silicon Valley. We support deep tech entrepreneurs using technology to solve some of the world's greatest problems. We invest when there's both a path to a billion dollars in year in revenue and the ability to create massive positive social or environmental impact. We believe that the most valuable companies over the next decades will be those solving these big global problems. In fact, we think that this trend is going to be as impactful as the transition from the desktop to the cloud or from web to mobile. We think the next big trend in business is from a profit only model to a profit plus impact model. Now, there's a lot of data to back up this thesis and I only have a little time. So I'm going to focus on one of the biggest drivers of this change, millennial attitudes toward business. Suffice it to say, millennials are not happy with business as usual. Deloitte did a study of 7,700 millennials across 29 countries and they asked an open-ended question, what is the purpose of business? A plurality of millennials, 47% said some version of the purpose of business is to improve society or protect the environment. This is diametrically opposed to every other generation which would have said something about making money. In that same study, 87% of millennials said the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance. But over half of the millennials surveyed believed that business was driven by nothing but profit alone. And so they're unhappy and they're planning on leaving. 25% of millennials were planning on leaving their place of work in the next year, 44% in the next two years and 66% in the next four years. And these weren't just junior employees. Over half of C-level millennials were planning on leaving within four years. You cannot build a sustainable business if your employees are planning on leaving in these numbers. And it's not just the goody-two-shoes millennials. Net Impact did a study of MBA students and found that 83% would take a 15% pay cut to work for a company that had positive social or environmental ends. Nine years ago, this number was 26%, and five years before that, this number was 15%. 15, 26, 83. That is a massive and sustained trend. So there's many other data points, but one of the questions we get so often is, okay, I'm convinced I believe that business will be about solving these big problems. But now what? People often get stuck at two questions. One, what are the world's biggest problems? What should I be focusing on? And two, how do I craft technological innovation that solves those problems? Now, it can be a very overwhelming task to categorize all the problems in the world. There are a lot. We felt frustrated when we attempted to do this ourselves at 50 years. When we started, we started to notice that the list we are coming up with looked vaguely familiar. And then we realized that a bunch of smart people had spent many years and many millions of dollars doing the same thing, categorizing the world's biggest problems. I'm talking about the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. So the UN has put out a number of goals to help solve the world's biggest problems. Now, this list is by no means comprehensive. It's by no means perfect. There are a few big problems that we would like to see on this list. There are a few details that we don't necessarily think are super important. But it's a great starting place to get everyone on the same page on what the big problems are. And especially if you're searching for innovative business solutions to problems, the Sustainable Development Goals are great because they break things down. For instance, in Sustainable Development Goal number two, zero hunger, there's a target and indicators. The target you see here is to end malnutrition by 2030. And some of the indicators are things like the rates of stunting in children under five. That's incredibly helpful if you're looking about how you can slot a business into solving this problem. So now, we have a list of problems, but how do we craft solutions? We need technological innovations that not only help solve these problems, but that are also good businesses. At 50 years, we like things that can achieve a billion dollars in revenue a year. Not necessarily an easy task. So how do we go about figuring this out? Well, I am a chess player. This is me playing World Chess Champion Magnus Carlson. For those of you that are curious, I defeated Magnus Carlson at Ping Pong. He then beat me in this chess game. In chess, one of the easiest and most effective ways at becoming a better player is to develop your pattern recognition. So I want to help you all develop pattern recognition for what good technology innovation solutions look like. In chess, the best way of developing pattern recognition is to study the games of players who play very well. And so we're going to do something similar. We're going to study the businesses of some of the founders in the 50 years portfolio. First, we're going to focus on one sustainable development goal, a big one, the climate. Now, I think we all know that one of the biggest contributors to this problem are fossil fuels and the burning of them. And hence, an obvious solution is renewable energy, things like solar or wind or geothermal. But those are the obvious solutions. And what I want to talk about are some of the non-obvious ways of attacking this problem. This is a company that we seeded called Memphis Meats. Memphis Meats, as Winston Churchill predicted, grows real meat without the animals. They do this by farming cells directly. Think about it this way. Functionally, we're using animals in society as pieces of technology to take plant protein inputs and through biological processes convert those inputs into outputs that we like to eat, drink or wear. Meat, milk, leather. Memphis Meats is saying, what if we just replicated those same biological processes but just outside of an animal? And it makes sense because there's a huge number of problems doing it with animals. They weren't designed for that. They were designed to live and reproduce. They're not particularly good at it. They contribute massively to climate change. Animal agriculture is responsible for more CO2 emissions than all of the transportation sector combined. In addition to that, there's huge health concerns with the use of antibiotics on factory farms. And industrial agriculture is reaching the limits of scale and still failing to feed the world. So Memphis Meats by farming cells directly is solving all of these problems. And I don't think I have to explain how they make money. It's very simple. If they create delicious, healthy meat more cheaply than conventional animal agriculture, they will dominate a trillion-dollar market. What's interesting about them is they're not just addressing one sustainable development goal. By providing affordable, healthy protein, they're helping with goal number two. By making meat that could be better for the heart, they're attacking SDG number three. By allowing urban areas and communities that are food deserts and don't have access to land to take control of their food production, they're attacking SDG number 11. And by eliminating a lot of the inputs that go into our food, they're attacking SDG number 12. I was talking to Virgin founder Richard Branson a couple of weeks ago about Memphis Meats. And we have our own reasons for being very excited. But Richard chose to invest because animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of deforestation, which is an issue that's near and dear to his heart. And Memphis Meats can end that, SDG number 15. This is a portfolio company called Solugin. Solugin makes industrial chemicals enzymatically using plant-sugar inputs, starting with hydrogen peroxide. Currently, hydrogen peroxide is produced in what's called the anthroquinine process. It requires massive plants, $100 million to make five football fields long. They're toxic. They require petrochemical inputs and they often explode. Solugin is able to make hydrogen peroxide using plant-sugar inputs in a two-step process with a reactor that could easily fit on this stage. They will make sustainable, safe, cheaper hydrogen peroxide and dominate that industry and eliminate the need for fossil fuels contributing to our SDG. Here's another interesting take. This is a company called Starsky Robotics. They're building driverless trucks. Now, in addition to eliminating one of the circles that we saw earlier about transport deaths, they're helping on the climate change SDG because the transportation sector is a significant contributor to emissions. And one of the reasons it is is because humans are not particularly efficient drivers. We break, we gas, we break, we gas. If we transition to a fully autonomous transportation system, we can drastically reduce the emissions from the transportation system. So now I want to talk about an important class of companies if you're thinking about getting into this. They're called Impact Infrastructure, or at least that's what we call them. This is a class of technologies or companies that need to exist as the infrastructural layer for other people to create massive impact. Here's one of our portfolio companies called Estronis. They're building small satellites to cover the earth and internet in order to bring online the 4 billion people who have no access. And by the way, that 4 billion number is not the number of people that have intermittent access or poor quality access. There are 4 billion people on earth right now who have zero access to the internet. Think about all the SDGs that can be touched by providing people affordable access to the internet, by allowing people to start online businesses, by allowing people to educate themselves or by allowing educational app developers to build tools and disseminate them. It boosts economic growth by giving people access to a global innovation ecosystem. And by allowing people to more easily track what their governments are doing and mobilize if they're not happy, it leads to more just and stable civic society. So how is Estronis doing this? Well, they're taking an approach very similar to the approach that Google took with their servers. At some point, Google was growing so fast, their server costs began to be astronomical. And the typical solution when you need more server capacity was to buy a top-of-the-line IBM and throw it in there, but it's massively expensive. So Google engineers said there must be a better way. And what they ended up doing is taking largely off-the-shelf components, engineering them together in a very clever way, and this allowed them to get 90% of the capacity at 10% of the cost. Estronis is doing something very similar for satellite internet. There exists satellite internet today, but the companies that make these spend three to four years and 300 to 350 million dollars to throw up a massive satellite the size of a room, which means the service it provides is massively expensive. Estronis, by making small satellites in a matter of months, can get most of the capacity for a fraction of the cost and therefore provide affordable internet to the 4 billion people who are unconnected. We live in incredibly exciting times. It is now possible to solve some of the world's biggest problems with deep technology. All of you here in the room and watching online can participate in this. We need you all to participate in this. Now is the time to fulfill Winston's vision in 50 years hence. So let's take up his call to arms. Let's get to work. Thank you.