10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (Part II)

From VC Fundraising to Mobile Game Spending, Church Attendance to AI Freelancing

Aug 07, 2024

Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.

If you haven’t subscribed, join 60,000 weekly readers by subscribing here:

10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing

Last week in Part I, we looked at five charts that embody important and interesting trends. We covered topics ranging from ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to WhatsApp user growth, from egg freezing trends to AI’s impact on work.

This week in Part II, we look at charts #6 through #10:

The Rise of Ketamine
The Peaks and Valleys of the Music Industry
Americans (Finally) Love WhatsApp
The Rise of Egg Freezing
The End of Work? We’ve Heard That Before.
Tough Times for VC Fundraising
Who Do Young Americans Live With?
The Decline of Churches
ATT and Mobile Game Spending
AI’s Impact on Freelancing

My hope is that this is an engaging way to visualize a variety of important trends. Let’s jump in 📈

6️⃣ Tough Times for VC Fundraising

Pitchbook shared a few recent charts that capture the environment for VC fundraising. The outlook: not great. Particularly for first-time funds, which are both rarer and smaller than we’ve seen in recent years.

That’s quite the drop-off.

And it’s a shame, since data shows that first-time funds outperform from a returns perspective. (Same for smaller funds, with an obvious correlation between the two: a recent study from PitchBook and Sante Ventures found that venture funds smaller than $350M are 50% more likely to generate a 2.5x return than funds larger than $750M.) LPs are instead gravitating towards the established names.

We dug into this phenomenon in March’s Two Roads Diverged: The Splitting of Venture Capital, which argued that venture is bifurcating into asset managers and artisans. The former—the multi-stage firms—are vacuuming up most of the capital right now. In that March piece, we noted that two firms—Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst—had captured 44% of all US VC fundraising for 2024.

From March’s Two Roads Diverged: The Splitting of Venture Capital

This trend continues, with Pitchbook noting that established managers captured 77% of LP capital in the first half of 2024. The chart above shows fundraising data through June 30th, and we can see that first-time funds are lagging well behind past vintages.

This probably won’t change any time soon, as we need distributions to catch up. One metric to track is the rate of distributions to net asset value. Over the last decade, this rate averaged 17.1% for US venture capital firms. In 2020 and 2021, we rose to 35%. Today, we sit at <5%.

In the near-term, I expect we’ll see the big get bigger. LPs will congregate around a handful of names. Longer-term, though, as more LP dollars get unlocked, we’ll see a new generational of specialized, artisanal firms rise up to counteract the “industrialization” of asset manager VCs.

7️⃣ Who Do Young Americans Live With?

Last week’s piece including this chart on the rising age of new moms in America:

That chart was a segue into data on the rise of egg freezing and IVF. But there’s another ripple effect of getting married later and having kids later: changing household compositions. In the 1960s, over 80% of 25-to-34 year-olds lived with a spouse. Today, that share has been cut in half:

We see the share of young people living with parents and other relatives rise steadily. This is partially because of housing—buying a home has become less affordable. One of my favorite memes shows Boomers celebrating and dancing, superimposed with text like this:

Boomers strike again — A consistently funny meme about Boomer housing prices

Changes in household composition have trickle effects into various sectors and market forces: senior care, child care, car sales, home sales, grocery, insurance, and so on.

8️⃣ The Decline of Church Attendance

In the chart above, 11% of people live alone. Here’s a different view, showing single-person households:

While 1 in 3 households is single-person, still only about 1 in 10 Americans live alone. This share rises with age—from a 2017 research paper:

The population of solitaries rises from 4 percent of adults at ages 18-24 to 9 percent at 25-34, dips to 8 percent at 35-44, then rises again, to 12 percent at 45-54, 17 percent at 55-64 and 26 percent at 65 and up.

One related effect here: our loneliness epidemic. An interesting way to track the decline of community in America is by looking at the decline in church membership. From Gallup surveys:

This is a big drop—we’re down 25 percentage points in 80 years. And it’s not because PDF is replacing Catholicism.

Pew Research data shows that about a third of Millennials and a third of Gen Zs are atheists; in urban places like New York, it’s significantly higher. Overall, the share of US adults who don’t go to church is now about 50%:

Vermont (75%), New Hampshire (66%) and Maine (66%) are the least religious states. Mississippi (32%), Alabama (36%) and Louisiana (37%) are the most religious.

It’s not that we need churches, per se; it’s that we need places for gathering and socialization. Alongside the decline in church attendance, the number of community arts and recreation centers declined by 18% from 2008 to 2015. The rise of the internet and social media has also coincided with a decline in hanging out with friends.

9️⃣ ATT and Mobile Gaming Spend

Mobile game spending has plateaued. Check out this chart:

What gives?

One Twitter user blamed the rise of TikTok. But correlation does not equal causation, and TikTok’s 2020 rise was not the key factor here. Instead, as Eric Seufert outlines, the culprit is actually Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) changes.

ATT decimated mobile advertising by making measurement more difficult for advertisers. The impact has been largely unappreciated: as the chart above shows, we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars in spend and user acquisition.

We’re beginning to see leaders attack Apple more directly for its dominance, ruthlessness, and influence. One example: rather than alluding toward a large competitor, as he may have in the past, Mark Zuckerberg recently called out Apple by name in his blog post on open source AI:

“One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build.”

ATT changes continue to create headwinds for customer acquisition, forcing companies to get creative about how to crack distribution in efficient and scalable ways.

🔟 AI’s Impact on Freelancing

Last week’s piece looked at how AI will impact 1) average hours worked, and 2) average output per hours worked. We also looked at why Marc Andreessen’s prediction of the end of the 9-to-5 workday won’t come true.

Speaking of AI’s impact on work, AI is already having a strong impact on the freelance economy. The Wall Street Journal conducted an interesting report here, speaking with Upwork to understand which freelance categories are on the rise and which are on the decline.

Here’s the main visual:

Essentially, freelance jobs that require basic writing, coding, or translation are disappearing across postings on Upwork. In other words, tasks that AI is pretty good at.

This aligns with findings of researchers at institutions like Harvard Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Hong Kong. Those researchers found that since the debut of ChatGPT, freelance job postings on Upwork and Fiverr have dropped 21% in categories for which AI does a good job. Meanwhile, categories where AI augments freelancers but doesn’t replace the human outright (data science or IT, for example) drives a 40% increase in freelancer pay.

I’ll do another “10 Charts” series this fall. In the meantime, I’d love to see any charts that you’ve been struck by. You can reply to this email, or send me a DM on Twitter at @Rex_Woodbury.

Until next week 👋

Related Digital Native Pieces: Past Installments of 10 Charts

Thanks for reading! Subscribe here to receive Digital Native in your inbox each week: