Trend-spotting ... from one who knows

Joining GYANA's SAMSARA Summer Splash hosted by co-founders Joyeeta Das & David Kell provided a stimulating & interesting end to my week. Joyeeta, David & team had assembled a dazzling line-up of movers, shakers, thinkers, investors, innovators, starters & finishers from across the tech and especially #datascience world to challenge our thinking & entertain us as the weekend beckons.

I'd like to tell you more about Joyeeta's fireside chat today with one of her own investors, the brilliant but engagingly humble, personable & just downright likeable & helpful Biz Stone. Most people will know Biz as one of #Twitter's co-founders but over the years he's invested in many, many businesses personally as an angel. Some are household names but other companies are less well known. As Joyeeta will attest, Biz takes a genuine interest in the companies and founders he's involved with and one of the charming statements he made at today's event that I'm sure endeared him even more to every person listening was "It really makes me feel good to help other entrepreneurs; to get down into the hole with them and help them figure things out".

Joyeeta asked Biz today about spotting trends - something he's clearly very good at. These were the two he chose to discuss and as you read them you'll understand the reason for my post. The first he picked was his fondness for #democratisation. In case you don't know what that means, the definition in the dictionary is "the action of making something accessible to everyone". I can see why Biz likes it so much. 20 years ago he was one of the first bloggers - enticed by the idea of people being able to easily and freely share ideas online without needing to know how to code. He elaborated in terms of democratisation by saying "taking something that used to be elitist and expensive and making it low cost, available, accessible and more valuable and powerful". A man after my own heart as this was something that some of us did in terms of democratising learning in the mid noughties.

His second choice was products or services that provide a double bottom line. As a supporter of tech for good this too was music to my ears. Biz went on to explain further "a product or a service that has a purpose in itself, but it also brings value to society and the world". A good example in his own investment portfolio is of course Beyond Meat.

Before I finish this short post, any fans of #nocode or anyone out there who fancies themselves as a citizen developer should check out Gyana's #VAYU product set. As well as allowing non data scientists to build and use machine learning solutions no-code platforms are intrinsically valuable to data scientists as well because they allow them to work faster, which is lucky because in this new world we're now in, data scientists are going to be in even more demand than they were before. So VAYU - another great example of a product with a double bottom line ... it's no surprise that Biz invested when he did.