Welcome fellow traveller!

First off, let me briefly introduce myself:

<aside> 💁🏼 I am Yura.

Currently – Head of Scouting & Analytics at ULTRA.VC. We invest in and support impact-driven founders from the very first steps of the startup lifecycle.

I’ve been on all the sides of a startup world: a VC, a founder, and an executive: – ex-co-founder | Afterglow (global community of people who care to help people overcome challenging life situations, 60k+ MAU at the peak); – ex-CEO | EduDo (video-based asynchronous discussions mobile platform, Mobile App of the Year by Product Hunt); – ex-VC | Flint Capital (analyzed 2k+ startups).

My strongest passions are searching for new ideas at the intersection of sociocultural and tech trends, network effects, consumer social platforms, working with cognitive biases, and storytelling.

You can find my thoughts on Substack and 𝕏, don’t hesitate dropping me a follow if you have not already.

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Due to the specifics of my job and mindset I’m almost constantly in some kind of a research. That results in tons of insights, and I thought that would be great to start sharing some of them with more people.

I believe that the best ideas always lay at the intersection of technological and sociocultural trends and the latest are even more important in most cases. No new tech will be worth it if enough people are not ready to change their behavior to successfully utilize it. And it generally takes people much more time to change their attitudes and habits than to develop new technologies.

For example, there has been no technological limitations to build meritocratic governance systems for a couple of years. Still, we haven’t heard about even mid-size communities successfully implementing and utilizing them. I think, that’s because there’re too few people ready to give it a shot now. Sometimes their time may come, and the winners here will be the ones who will keep on a pulse of sociocultural trends.

I’m pretty sure you’ve seen lots of trend-focused stuff online so there’s no reason to highlight more or less obvious ones. You won’t find below the Rise of LLMs, Political and Economic Uncertainty, Remote and hybrid work, Student debt burden, Broken pipeline between education and career, Personalized and adaptive learning, Evolution of LMSs, Mental health crisis, Lack of mental health professionals, Physical fitness crisis, and many more important but quite well-known trends.

Not wasting your time any more, let’s move on.

We’re currently reimagining the very concept of work-life balance.

Work and life are no longer separate entities dancing a tango. We are now weaving personal passions into our professional pursuits, finding joy and fulfillment in the overlap.

In this evolving landscape, our perception of jobs is undergoing a transformation. It’s no longer about climbing the corporate ladder or amassing impressive job titles like a badge of honor.

Employees are charting nonlinear career paths. 56% of candidates report applying for jobs outside their current area of expertise, and this figure is expected to climb further in the coming years.

More than that, people tend to work less and less, and the trend will definitely continue.

In the US, the share of prime-age men neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the 1970s, and the number of jobs in manufacturing is down 30% since just 2000. From the UAE to Iceland and the UK, around the world many societies are exploring ideas the likes of the four-day working week.