The Chomp #040

The Event Industry's Napster Moment, Remix Machines, and More...

Hey Everyone,

Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best strategic thinking content and top emerging business trends from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. If you’ve been sent this email and you’re not a subscriber, you can join by clicking on the blue button below. With that, let’s dive into it.

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Quick Bite

The Event Industry Is Being Confronted By Its Napster Moment: We are habituating the business world to free or almost free events where we used to charge thousands of dollars for conferences and other business events. We are habituating sponsors to pay a fraction of what they used to pay, with more precise targeting that online tech and tracking allows. We are habituating a world to less business travel, a world that is arguably better and happier without so much weight of people criss-crossing the planet and countries. We at Skift are estimating that about 10 to 15 percent of business travel demand may leave the market permanently, and it may also lead to the death of single-meeting business trip, all of which will have direct and indirect implications for the events industry.

A couple of months ago, I highlighted an interesting piece from Benedict Evans about solving online events. In the time since I shared that article, it has become increasingly more clear that the event industry as a whole is facing a reckoning. Rafat Ali—the Founder & CEO of travel intelligence and media platform Skift—sees this reckoning as the event industry’s Napster Moment.

In the early 2000s, the music industry underwent a massive shift from CDs and radio to digital downloads and streaming. Over the course of 15 years, the music industry went from peak revenues of $21.5B in 2000 to a low of $6.9B in 2015. It wasn’t until 2016—when Spotify and other music streaming services improved enough—that revenues in the industry started to grow again.

The event industry today finds itself in the same position the music industry faced at the start of the new Millenium. Zoom and other video conferencing software have become the Napster of the event industry. With Zoom, anyone can put on good-enough virtual events for a global audience at basically no cost. As a result, the business world is quickly becoming accustomed to free and low-cost virtual events in place of conferences and other events that typically cost thousands of dollars.

In the music world, as soon as consumers got used to downloading music for free with Napster, or paying 99 cents a song on iTunes, there was no going back to the old model of purchasing physical CDs. It’s tough to see virtual events not having a similar impact on the event industry. While many Zoom and virtual events today are clunky and don’t feel right, one must keep in mind how young the tech in this space is. It took 15 years of perfecting tech in the music industry to finally reverse declining revenues.

With this in mind, you can start to frame what the next five years in the event industry might look like. There's bound to be a ton of investment as well as innovation in the space resulting in an overhaul of the industry. It's also likely we'll see a very different future for event venues, business hotels, and convention cities like Orlando and Las Vegas.

As this new paradigm in the event industry unfolds, it’s crucial for entrepreneurs, investors, as well as incumbents to be aware of common lessons that will likely apply to the space. Give this article a read to see an excellent list of these lessons that Rafat has shared.

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Deeper Dive

Notion, Airtable, and Fortnite Prove Tech is in the Age of the Remix: In the short documentary series, “Everything is a Remix” (of which this article is a remix; meta) filmmaker Kirby Ferguson argues that what we call “creativity” is really the output of three distinct actions: copying, transforming, and combining. The world of art, music, film — the sum of the world’s creativity, in truth — relies on this process, whether the outcome is a Michael Bay movie or a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. Jean Luc-Godard, the French auteur, was supposed to have noted, “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

Many of the best things in life are often remixes of something that has come before it. Whether it’s food, art, experiences, or products, it’s rare to come across something that’s truly original. Almost every idea is born of some idea that came before it. The world of technology is no different.

Revolutionary devices such as the iPhone and Apple’s Macintosh computer are no exception. They both remixed and borrowed ideas from earlier products. Remixing is a pivotal part of the creative process that deserves to be embraced by all. The tech world has latched onto this notion in recent years; and as a result, we have officially entered the age of the remix.

In this excellent essay, Mario Gabriele breaks down two areas in the tech universe that are most embracing the idea of “remix machines". He walks us through remixes taking place in the categories of work tools and coding in addition to exploring new opportunities. With work tools, a number of remixes have cropped up in recent years in an effort to build upon and displace Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. A few examples include innovative tools like Notion, Airtable, and Projector.

On the coding front, tools have emerged that simplify the creation of both internal and external software products. Retool allows developers to build internal tools easier than ever before. Webflow and a host of additional no-code tools allow anyone to spin up a website or application with no coding experience. These “remixes” are forever changing the web-development landscape.

Beyond these examples, there are a host of additional sectors in the tech world ripe for remixes. Mario sees the three ripest areas as converging feedback and product, extending teams, and storytelling. He provides a compelling explanation for each, which makes it easy to envision the next wave of tools that will likely come into existence.

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Chum Bucket

• How TikTok’s Talks With Microsoft Turned Into a Soap Opera (NYT)

• Y Combinator CEO Faces the Crisis and His Critics (The Information)

• Going Public Circa 2020; Door #3: The SPAC (Above the Crowd - Bill Gurley)

• TikTok CEO Quits as Trump Administration Plans Bans (Bloomberg)

• The Inside Story Of Robinhood’s Billionaire Founders (Forbes)

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Tweet of the Week

Kanyi Maqubela @km

“Sports are like the reward of a functioning society,” -Sean Doolittle, ⚾️

Song of the Week

Apple Music Link

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Books

Currently Reading

Recently Read

• Zero to One sat on my reading list for quite some time before I finally picked it up. Despite having rave reviews and being considered one of the quintessential books on startups, I never felt compelled to prioritize it ahead of other books on my list. After finishing it, I’ll admit that was a mistake—I should have read it sooner. Peter Thiel is one of the great contrarian thinkers of our time, and his work speaks for itself. Setting his somewhat controversial political views aside, Thiel is an expert founder, operator, and investor. Zero to One offers a fantastic outline of Thiel’s business philosophy and his filled to the brim with valuable advice. This is worth a read regardless of your interest in the startup economy. (4.5/5)

• Essentialism is a book that I wish I knew about much sooner. Greg McKeown’s philosophy of essentialism is a powerful antidote to the craziness of our non-stop world. McKeown lays out the argument that we can actually accomplish more by doing less through the relentless pursuit of focusing on what’s essential. By setting out on the path to essentialism, we can all make the highest possible contribution to the things that really matter to us. Essentialism was an impactful read that will now be high up on my list of recommendations. (4.5/5)

Parting Thoughts

This Week in History

• Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995. The release of Windows 95 was one of the largest product launches in history, selling over a million copies in under four days. (Source)

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

— William Penn

If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.

-CM

This newsletter is created and authored by Cody McCauley and is published and provided for informational purposes only. The information in the newsletter solely constitutes Cody’s own opinions. None of the information contained in the newsletter constitutes—or should be construed as—investment advice.