The CQ | 2025 Optimism
The Forerunner Team's Must-Reads of the Week
The CQ is Forerunner’s weekly newsletter rounding up the most pressing consumer news and analysis, plus some bonus musings from our investment team. Subscribe now to get the latest edition in your inbox every weekend.
By Kirsten Green, @kirstenagreen
I truly can’t remember a time that we kicked off the year with as much energy around the many opportunities to be tackled. It’s no doubt an expression of the dynamic market ahead.
We closed out 2024 with the announcement of our newest $500M fund, our state-of-market report, and new research on the marketplaces model — along with no shortage of portfolio milestones.
2025 is bound to be a consequential year for the tech industry and start-up ecosystem with a generational platform shift under way, new regulation coming into place, and new dimensions in what’s possible for company-building. These changes underpin a time of great potential and a calling to take bold, but deeply considered, risks. Open-mindedness is perhaps the ultimate edge: the most important companies of tomorrow may seem unusual, unexpected, and even undefined today.
Our team is already off to the races, actively investing in consumer health, consumer finance, personal software, social, ecommerce, career empowerment, and more. We want to hear from anyone building with ambition here: investments@forerunnerventures.com.
Team note: Our hearts and minds are with Los Angeles this week. We continue to check in with our LA-based founders, teammates, and partners about how we can support them and their communities during such an incomprehensible tragedy. For those who are able to donate, please join us in contributing to Baby2Baby, LA Fire Department Foundation, Direct Relief, and California Fire Foundation.
What We’re Talking About on Slack:
What happens when a whole generation never grows up? Economic struggles due to rising housing and childcare costs, student debt, and stagnant wages are often blamed when it comes to young people putting off traditional milestones of adulthood. But now the situation seems to be more complex—for many, the delay has become “a permanent state of arrested development” where the kicking down the road leads to a full omission (ex: never moving out of their parent’s house, never getting married, and never finding their footing in their career). Despite higher median wages compared to their parents at their age, just 21% of 30-somethings rated the overall economy as good or excellent last year, and young adults are more pessimistic about the future in light of climate change, political polarization, AI, and resentment of corporate power. Another factor impeding the shift to adulthood and full independence: expectations for what constitutes a good life have risen significantly, with many now expecting larger homes, yearly vacations, and more career success than earlier generations. “Part of this is social expectations, part of this is shifting priorities, and part of this is economic realities.”
What matters more for longevity: genes or lifestyle? According to research, a healthy lifestyle that includes exercising, eating well, sleeping enough, and managing stress can help extend people’s lives to age 80 or 90. But when it comes to reaching 100, genetics play a much larger role. “Overall, scientists think that how long we live is about 25% attributable to our genes, and 75% attributable to our environment and lifestyle. But as people near 100 and beyond, those percentages start to flip.” Centenarians often have rare gene variants that help them avoid age-related diseases like heart disease, cancer, and dementia. For example, the APOE2 gene reduces Alzheimer’s risk, and FOXO3 has been linked to cellular health and longevity. Related: new research shows that money can buy a longer life—to a point. Each successive jump in income is linked to smaller boosts in longevity — on average, someone with a household income of $14,000 would live about 10 fewer months than someone making $20,000, and that same 10-month gap exists between household incomes of roughly $160,000 and $225,000.
Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs. Even though the U.S. economy has added over 2 million jobs in the last year, more than 7 million Americans are unemployed, and more than 1.6 million of them have been job searching for at least six months, a 50% increase since the end of 2022. While the unemployment rate remains relatively low at 4.2%, the job market is showing signs of weakness, particularly in high-paying office jobs in tech, law, finance, and media. It now takes, on average, about six months for workers to find new roles, a month longer than during the post-pandemic hiring boom. More people have been forced to switch industries to land a job. In the past six months, more than half of newly hired workers reported changing fields to get their latest position, up from a more typical level of around 40%.
There is no shortage of writing on how Americans are becoming lonelier, but this Atlantic feature on ‘The Anti-Social Century’ is particularly in-depth. Cultural shifts in American life—everything from the national embrace of takeout and the adoption and Gen Z’ers who celebrate when plans are canceled—are leading to increased isolation that has a profound impact on “our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.” There are a lot of startling stats: “A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10% lower household income.” Also covered: how our home-based, phone-based culture is eroding the "middle ring" of relationships, essentially the village (neighbors, coworkers, acquaintances, people around town). “The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics.”
AI needs so much energy, it’s distorting U.S. power for millions of homes. The electricity-powering homes are increasingly affected by "bad harmonics." Essentially, the quality of the electricity flowing to homes is being eroded enough to cause home appliances to overheat, and motors to rattle, and can even lead to billions of dollars of equipment damage and fires. This can also eventually cause lights to flicker along with brownouts and blackouts. More than half of households with the worst power distortions are within 20 miles of major data center hubs, notably in Northern Virginia, a data center hotspot. Overall, about 3.7 million Americans live in the most impacted areas. “There’s a big hurdle when it comes to measuring the problem, which thus makes it challenging to address, according to more than half a dozen experts interviewed by Bloomberg News. Most utilities don’t have the capacity to track on the residential level because it would be too costly.”
Portfolio Highlights:
Wellfound names Faire as one of the top startups of 2025
CNET reviews the Duckbill assistant app
Forbes details Oura CEO Tom Hale’s 2025 predictions
WWD rounded up 2025 travel forecasts from Fora
Fortune traces the rise of the Oura Ring
Job of the Week:
Head of Partnerships at Wonder, the new platform for scaling chef-prepared, great-quality food through a modern restaurant and delivery concept.
There are other ~605 jobs currently available at portfolio companies, check ‘em out.