EIEIO...Moneyballing Motherhood
EIEIO...Moneyballing Motherhood
Parenting in the Age of AI
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EIEIO…Fast Facts
Entrepreneurship: $3 billion – the exit achieved by René Rechtman’s Moonbug Entertainment in less than three years raising $145 million to buy and grow children’s shows CocoMelon, Blippi, and Little Baby Bum. (Private Equity Guy)
Innovation: 16% – current E-commerce retail sales as a % of total sales, approaching its pandemic high (16.4%) set in Q2 of 2022. (Koyfin)
Education: >40 million – The number of U.S. learners who have started college but never finished. (National Student Clearing House Research Center)
Impact: 1 in 9 – the fraction of children in the U.S., between the ages of 3 and 17, who have been diagnosed with ADHD. (NPR)
Opportunity: 80% – the percentage of all ship-to-shore cranes in the United States that are made by just one company: China’s state-owned manufacturing and engineering firm ZPMC. (Art of Procurement)
“There is no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one.” – Jill Churchill
“A mother has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.” – Sophia Loren
“Mother knows best.”
Where did “feed a cold, starve a fever” come from?
Or was it “starve a cold, feed a fever”?
How much medical/educational/nutritional advice was dispersed over the years via anecdotes or wives’ tales?
Where was the science behind teaching kids to swim by physically throwing them into the deep end? Two of my relatives won’t swim to this day due to that traumatizing experience.
All of us who are writing or reading this probably, somehow, made it through our random walk through childhood. But, something tells me there has to be a better way.
Today, technology has permeated every phase of parenting. This spans from cycle-tracking wearables to mind-blowing AI-powered renderings of babies in the womb with modern-day sonograms, to robotic bassinets, to location sharing enabling you to follow your child’s every footstep through adolescence.
The pace of change has been rapid. After all, it was not long ago that ultrasounds looked like this:
This is a baby monitor from 2008:
Now, you can watch your baby in ultra-HD from anywhere.
When I was growing up, a parent’s “tracker” was a binary one - is the child home by dark?
Regardless of style, parenting a child is arguably the most consequential endeavor we will undertake in our lives. As a parent, you’re the coach, confidant, tutor, therapist, ruler, disciplinarian, caretaker, protector…all in one.
Despite the incredible gravity of parenting and the decision-making that comes with it, most of our choices are informed by familial advice, old wives’ tales, anecdotal stories, social media, one-size-fits-most parenting books, and simply watching others around us.
Don’t get us wrong…parenting advice from an experienced parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or friend can be completely invaluable. Earned wisdom goes a long way.
As we’ve pointed out before, the AI Revolution is not about man vs. machine, but man and machine. A motherly instinct will never be replaced. The difference is that a mother with strong instincts who is also equipped with comprehensive, personalized data and tailored insights about their child will be that much more powerful.
We have written about how Data is the New Oil, and with data at the foundation, it’s helpful to think in terms of layers. The software layer codifies knowledge, and the AI layer makes knowledge intelligent, but the smart layer is human intelligence.
At the software layer, offline data is collected and made orderly and query-able - this is how we can index the world’s information on the internet via search. When the dataset becomes vast enough, patterns, connections, insights, and inferences can be formed with a strong degree of accuracy.
You can ask ChatGPT for answers on tough parenting decisions because it has been trained on nearly every blog, article, and essay ever written on the topic. However, that information is not specifically for your child. In fact, even if it’s for “7-month-old boys living with cradle cap”, the instruction will not be nearly as accurate as it would be if it were informed by data unique to a specific child’s health and environment.
For the past several years, we have been in the data collection phase of this transition to a world where we will be able to Moneyball Motherhood. No, this does not mean outsourcing all judgment to an LLM. This means providing parents with the ability to make informed decisions with comprehensive, accurate, and personalized data at their disposal.
Huckleberry, a sleep-tracking app for infants, encapsulates the essence of what we anticipate from Moneyballing Motherhood products with its slogan: "We handle details so you can focus on what matters."
Managing the minutiae of parenting, such as remembering the exact times and durations of a baby's naps throughout the day, is both time-consuming and stress-inducing. By outsourcing these details to technology, parents can concentrate on the more significant aspects of parenting, enhancing both their effectiveness and their enjoyment of this crucial role.
For nearly every data-driven product that exists to optimize life for adults, there is almost always an equivalent for infants and young children.
At work, we have productivity trackers like Asana and Monday.com.
In schools, children have offerings like ClassDojo and Magic School.
For our health, wearable devices act as continuous monitors (available starting in infancy), to help us understand physical health needs with increased granularity.
We use nutritional trackers to keep running logs of our dietary intake.
With all of the above, the more data, the better. Parents will achieve the opposite of peace of mind if there are hallucinations that trigger alerts stating their baby has stopped breathing. Accuracy matters.
Today, the reality is that many of these offerings are prohibitively expensive for most people. After all, your average American can’t spend $2,000 on a crib. However, we are bullish on the Moneyballing Motherhood trend because history has consistently shown that over time, innovation consistently makes things cheaper, faster, and better. As these products and offerings become more frictionless, cost-effective, and powerful, more people will have access to them, ultimately transforming parenting for the better.
Market Performance
Market Commentary
After four long years, investors finally got the Fed rate cut they’ve been dreaming about. 50 bips decrease and all is right with the world again.
Responding as they were supposed to, stocks had a good (and record) week with the Dow rising 1.6%, the NASDAQ increasing 1.5%, and the S&P 500 up 1.4%. Year-to-date, NASDAQ and the S&P are tied, each advancing 19.6%.
In other notable signals, Gold reached an all-time high at $2,610 an ounce. Bitcoin is at $62,000 up materially in the past month and 142% in the past year.
Historically, stocks do well when interest rates are falling…especially growth stocks. We continue to look at the Market environment as favorable for long-term investors. Accordingly, we remain BULLISH.
Need to Know
READ: Learning in the Intimacy Economy | Dash Media x Artificiality
READ: Tony Robbins Debuts Longevity Hotels, Clinics | Fitt Insider
WATCH: Who might be the ultimate financial winners from the generative AI Revolution? | Science Is Strategic
CHECK IT OUT: Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe Launches the “San Francisco Freedom Club”
LISTEN: Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well | Invest Like The Best
GSV’s Four I’s of Investor Sentiment
GSV tracks four primary indicators of investor sentiment: inflows and outflows of mutual funds and ETFs, IPO activity, interest rates, and inflation.
#1: Inflows and Outflows for Mutual Funds & ETFs
#2: IPO Market
#3: Interest Rates
#4: Inflation
Charts of the Week
Maggie Moe’s GSV Weekly Rap
Chuckles of the Week
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Connecting the Dots & EIEIO…
Old MacDonald had a farm, EIEIO. New MacDonald has a Startup….EIEIO: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Education, Impact and Opportunity. Accordingly, we focus on these key areas of the future.
One of the core goals of GSV is to connect the dots around EIEIO and provide perspective on where things are going and why. If you like this, please forward to your friends. Onward!
Make Your Dash Count!
-MM