The New Consumer, in collaboration with Coefficient Capital, just published its latest Consumer Trends report, which you can download for free over here (registration required). There's a lot in the report to flip through, but I thought I would share these two slides:

Generation Z and Millennials now make up ~40% of the US population and they are soon entering their prime consumer spending years. What's noteworthy about these charts, but perhaps not surprising, is the extent in which self-expression and a sense of community have shifted from offline to online.

Very few Boomers, at least according to this report, feel like themselves online. But nearly half of Gen Z feel most like themselves online. What it means to be part of a "community" has also shifted dramatically, with more if it happening online or at least partially online.

All of this ties into what happened earlier in the week with Nike announcing the acquisition of RTFKT Studios. As I mentioned in this post, the so-called metaverse doesn't necessarily have to mean VR goggles and living in video games. It can simply mean placing value on the parts of our lives that are now digital. The above two charts suggest that many are already doing this.

Of course, what all of this means for our physical lives is an important question. Josh Stephens recently argued, over at Planetizen, that the metaverse is going to be really bad for cities. The more we focus on seductive virtual worlds, the less we will focus on our physical spaces. I get this logic.

But again, I think it depends on how you define the metaverse. And I think VR headsets are a pretty narrow definition. I am both a lover of technology and a lover of cities. And throughout this pandemic I have been fairly consistent in writing about the resiliency of cities. Nothing in this post changes that for me.

This week it was announced that Nike has acquired RTFKT Studios (pronounced "artifact") for an undisclosed amount. When I read the news (official Nike announcement here), I immediately thought to myself, "Yeah, of course!"

Some of you may remember that I wrote about RTFKT back in April. They are perhaps best known for their digital sneaker NFTs (on the Ethereum blockchain). And so this is an exceedingly obvious and strategic buy for Nike.

But more importantly, I think this is great validation for the crypto/NFT space and further evidence that our digital and physical worlds are continuing to collide in some new and very interesting ways.

What this ultimately means for life in 10 or 20 years is anybody's guess, but sneakers are the tip of the iceberg. And this doesn't necessarily mean that we're all destined to live in some sort of metaverse video game.

https://500px.com/embed.js

I have started to meet with developers for my new book – becoming a real estate developer – and I can’t begin to tell you how impressive and inspiring it is to learn about their stories.

It’s easy to look at someone who is successful and feel overwhelmed by everything they’ve accomplished. But nobody starts at the top of their game (unless maybe they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth). Usually there’s a backstory of sweat and struggle that rarely gets told. As the saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

But those are exactly the kinds of things I hope to uncover with this little project. I am less interested in the successes and more interested in the early decisions, struggles, and thoughts that went into making those successes even possible.

And one thing I’ve noticed is a tendency to just go for it. In fact, when I asked one developer if he had any advice for young aspiring developers, he said: just fucking do it.

As soon as he said this I couldn’t help but think of my elementary school English teacher who used always tell us the same thing – minus the expletive – whenever we’d ask him something such as, how long should this paper be, should we focus on this or that, and so on. He would always say: What does Nike say? Just do it. No buts. Just do it.