Open questions going into 2025

Last week I saw South Park Commons do something cool; release a list of open questions the team had about the future. Like them, I find the Request for Startups format a little archaic. It suggests I know more than most founders. Untrue. The future is always more interesting than you can often imagine and frankly I aspire to invest in people far smarter than me.

Here are some questions / loose thoughts I’ve been turning over; are you obsessing about one or working on a solution? Email me at sarah@commonmagic.xyz.

Is it time for techbio’s “transformer library” moment?

Leisure infrastructure. As one small example; how do you discover what’s happening today in a city, whether places, events or people?

What does cybersecurity look like next if we think the era of “everything in the cloud” is messier now?

How do we fix digital pollution? Is there a business model for the internet beyond ads?

What happens to trusted media (brands, voices) in the age of Perplexity?

How do we enable more collective ownership of assets (eg housing, compute)? Especially, what are mechanisms for individual and collective data ownership?

Is it time for a next wave civic technology scene?

Related; is UBI back on the table? What infra is needed to make it work?

What’s the low cost version of Neko?

Is self-hosting ever going to be a thing for the many, not the few?

Will there ever be a walled garden events app I do not strongly dislike?

What’s the Granola for workers outside the early adopter knowledge worker vertical (think; therapists)?

In 2024, I struggled to get excited about most B2B copilots, dating apps, LLMs enabling social shopping, dev tool projects not companies, the new vogue for defence (sometimes done thoughtlessly). Maybe this just means I didn’t meet the right teams or approach yet.