5 under-the-radar trends (+ our business ideas)

**Steph Smith** (0:00)
We all run into these stats throughout our lives, and most of us are just like, oh, that's cool. But I think there are some where it's like, maybe you should actually examine this a little more closely. And so I compiled 100 plus of these, and we can talk about some of them today.

**Sam Parr** (0:24)
Steph Smith, this is your 10th time on MFM. Is that right?

**Steph Smith** (0:29)
Not quite the tenor.

**Sam Parr** (0:31)
And Steph Smith, the background, if you're just now listening for the first time, she used to work with me at the Hustle where she ran this thing called Trends, trends.co. And then she went and joined A16Z, one of the most prominent venture capital firms. And your whole thing right now is finding up and coming trends, but you do it by looking at the data. Is that right?

**Steph Smith** (0:52)
I try to, I try to, but yeah, I guess now after Trends, I run this thing called Internet Pipes. And that was kind of like Trends in the way that you want to surface things that other people don't know about. But it's also about how do you show people how to catch their own fish, if that makes sense.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
And you come on every once in a while and you just basically have all of this data that you rattle off a story behind the number, a story behind the data, and you explain why it's an interesting trend. And sometimes you'll say like how different people are pouncing on this trend. Is that right?

**Steph Smith** (1:26)
Yeah. Yeah. Lately, or recently, I compiled this Digits database. I call it Digits. You guys call them like one chart businesses. But basically these generation defining stats, like we've all talked or heard about when Bezos saw the Internet was growing at some crazy rate and he was like, what does that mean? Well, it means that people will be buying stuff online in the future. Let me go create this crazy thing called Amazon. And so we all run into these stats throughout our lives, and most of us are just like, oh, that's cool. But I think there are some where it's like, okay, maybe you should actually examine this a little more closely. And so I compiled 100 plus of these, and we can talk about some of them today.

**Sam Parr** (2:06)
And the guy who, one of the two guys who started your firm, Mark Andreessen, he has this famous quote, or this famous story where people are like, Mark, what's most important? Is it having a good team? Is it having a good product? Or is it picking the right market? And he goes, it's picking the right market. That's easily the most important thing, because if you pick the right market, you could have a bad team and a bad product, and you still, like the market pulls the success out of you. So for example, you could have the world's greatest team who are brilliant, who are smart, and they come up with this amazing product, but if it's in a tiny market that people just don't want, then you're gonna lose. But if you are Coinbase in 2014, and crypto is all the rage, which is what happened, coinbase.com crashed all the time. It wasn't that good of a website, but people were begging for it. And so they put up with it and they used it and they pulled the company into fruition and made it a success. And so you are gonna show us potentially some of these markets.

**Steph Smith** (3:04)
Yeah, maybe, maybe. But I mean, I think that's the perfect setup, because if you think about it, a bunch of other people saw that exact same data point and he was like, oh, well, I should go create this company called Coinbase. And a bunch of other people were like, oh, I'm just gonna go for a run. I'm gonna go to my nine to five and ignore that same thing. So, let's start with one that you, I think, know pretty well, hearing loss. So, the stat or the digit is that nearly 2.5 billion people by 2050 are expected to experience hearing loss with over 700 million requiring rehabilitation. And then I saw this interesting quote that kind of was just like a frame to take away, which is that some project that hearing aids are about to become as common as reading glasses.
So, you think about just like how normalized reading glasses are, people wear them all the time, you have all these optometrists, like it's a very normal thing even if you think about the benefits that companies offer, right? Vision is often part of that. And then if you think about where hearing is in that equation, it is nowhere near that on the same trajectory yet, but if it's true that billions of people are going to require hearing loss and you even think about some of the other signals like the fact that today we have air pods in our ears or many people, at least in our circle, how many hours a day?