I’m excited to bring my children up in a world where anyone can learn anything, anyone can invest in anything, where world class software/tools are free to use and customize, and where anyone can contribute to software development regardless of their physical location.
We have made progress on all these dimensions and we’ll see even more foundational progress over the next decade. I hope it will lead to a more open and connected world and empower more diverse groups of people to create amazing things together.
Caveat: To participate, people need access to an internet connected device, and this is still only <60% of people in the world. As internet becomes more widely available and the cost of devices and data goes down substantially, more people will have access to these opportunities and be included.
Open Finance
I hope that everyone will be able invest in anything.
New projects will have (near zero cost) legal entities automatically spun up in the background, regulations will allow all of us to invest in products with any amount of money and own equity (with drastically simplified legal agreements). These micro pieces of equity will be liquid and easily to other people and there will be clear, immutable record of all these transactions (probably powered by cryptocurrencies).
People of any age/location will be able to contribute to projects with their friends with both their time or capital. They will all be able to create and capture value without the need for angel investors or venture capitalists (who currently have to meet accredited investor standards). They will not be excluded from early stage investing. People in any country will be able to buy fractions of securities in any other country, diversifying their exposure (particularly important for emerging markets).
Syndicates (groups making an investment) are still really expensive and has high friction, despite the progress we’ve made. SPVs on AngelList cost about ~$10k to set up and run over their lifetime and so only make sense for investment rounds of a few hundred thousand dollars (which is a lot of money). Rolling funds can accept much smaller amounts of capital than traditional funds, but are still expensive to run and require capital scale to make sense.
Software will power the legal and financial framework for investing (combined withj adoption of cryptocurrency and smart contracts) and will be able to reduce the overall cost and hide the underlying complexity.
Ultimately, this will provide access to more asset classes to more people at any quantum of capital. This will lead to more projects getting funded, and more people generating wealth through owning equity vs. renting their time.
Open Learning
I hope that anyone will be able to learn anything.
Access to the highest quality teaching materials will no longer be locked in walled gardens and this content will be completely open. Many leading universities are already opening up much of their teaching content (e.g. Harvard, Stanford) and this is the mission statement of the Khan Academy which has helped people learn all over the world, for free.
Students will be able to learn (at their own pace) using whatever format works best for their preferred method of learning (e.g. watching videos, reading text, listening to audio). They will easily be able to then test their mastery with interactive problems and real world applications at no marginal cost. I, personally, learn better visually and orally and that is why I found lectures in college so useful (and why I watch a lot of YouTube videos).
Schools and higher education will need to adapt (culturally and practically) to asynchronous learning, and a more diverse mix of students in each class. One of the main benefits of school and college is the ‘cohorts’ of students who go through the shared experiences (much of which happens outside of the classroom) and I still think it’s important to try and create opportunities for young people to have shared experiences and work in groups.
I hope that higher education, in particular, will preserve the cohort and community aspect but there will be specific focus (v.s. community as a byproduct) on collaborating in groups, building lasting friendships, and creating stuff together.
Open Software
I hope that anyone will be able to build anything (software) and getting started with the best tools in the world is free.
Open source is a very powerful movement and, at scale, encourages global collaboration and development so that software can easily modified to meet local expectations and standards. One of the best examples is WordPress, which powers 39% of the top 10 million websites in the world with tens of thousands of contributors working together asynchronously.
Software is now being developed in the cloud first and new projects are powered by more self serve SAAS tools than ever (Slack, Notion, Figma, Asana, GitHub). I hope that all of these tools start free to reduce the barrier to try out these tools, and also reduces the barrier for projects to start and for people to collaborate. It also puts more pressure on SAAS software developers to build quality products, have quality customer service and continue to improve their products over time.
In order to build a sustainable business SAAS companies will need to charge for features that become necessary when projects evolve into businesses that scale. This could include customer support, security, performance, connectivity with other applications, hosting and payments.
I also hope that more SAAS tools expose more of their information via API (in addition to building integrated solutions) and give project owners more ownership of their data own (so they don’t remain locked into these tools). This will also be better for the ecosystem as more tools will be able to talk to each other and less information will be lost across different tools which will improve the quality and efficiency of software development.
Open Work
I hope that anyone can work from anywhere.
The Covid-19 Pandemic has catalyzed mass adoption of distributed work especially for technology companies. If companies can hire globally it significantly increases their accessible talent pool v.s. the constraint of hiring locally (along with many of other benefits). I’m a big fan of distributed work for software development, and write about it on my blog.
With more open work, people of all ages, races, nationalities will be able to collaborate on projects together, bringing more perspectives to the table. These products will end up being better suited for global audiences, as these perspectives and empathy will naturally make it into the product development process.
Workers will be more focused on collecting skills and knowledge vs. collecting brands. When we recruit now, we use proxies to infer skills or background; where we went to school, what companies we have worked at, or how we were brought up. This should evolve into showcasing our specific skills backed up by actual contributions to specific projects that roll up into a more accurate picture of our whole self. Companies will also become better at assessing skills, knowledge and experience over relying on brands as a proxy for the requirements for jobs to be done.
I’m excited raise my children in a more equitable world where less of their fate is decided at birth and I’m inspired and hopeful at the progress we are making globally.
We will see continued improvement in social and economic mobility, better products from more diverse people and more collaboration across groups with different ages, genders and countries.
Aadil Mamujee 
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