From Caves to Concerts: How Human Gatherings Will Shape The Future
Picture this: You're at a Coldplay concert , surrounded by thousands of people, all moving to the same rhythm, all feeling that same energy coursing through their veins. The lights dance, the music soars, and for a brief moment, everyone in that arena exists in perfect synchronicity.
Now, here's a question that keeps me up at night: What's the true value of these moments of collective human experience?
Ancient Fires, Modern Gatherings
Gatherings are as old as humanity itself. In prehistoric times, our ancestors gathered around ancient fires, where they would share tales of their hunts, dreams, and fears. These gatherings weren’t merely social events – they were the atomic units of our first societies, the crucibles where culture was forged and communities were born.
Little has changed. Humans still gather around proverbial fires across the globe every day, creating billions of hours of meaningful interaction. Every gathering carries rich context – dense information about who’s there, why they’ve come, who invited them, their origins and destinations. While technology has enabled some gatherings to move into virtual spaces, the overwhelming majority remain in real life (IRL), where the magic of human connection truly happens.
These gatherings occur in what sociologists term the "third place" – those vital spaces of assembly between our homes and workplaces. Think cafes, gyms, bookstores, parks, stadiums, libraries, theaters, restaurants, and parties. What makes these gatherings special is their synchronicity: when people unite for a shared purpose, something magical happens. They enter an identical energetic state, creating moments of perfect alignment.
Yet this ephemeral IRL presence, the powerful combination of location, time, state of mind, and collective energy – remains largely untapped. Despite being incredibly dense in participant information, these moments of connection dissipate without being captured or understood.
Attention networks: The Other Fires We Gather Around
In the digital world, Attention is the primary currency. Attention networks like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have mastered the art of harvesting our attention through carefully designed dopamine triggers. TikTok’s algorithm, for instance, works relentlessly to serve the perfect video for you within three attempts. Instagram and Facebook, once genuine social networks, meant to foster human connection, have transformed into entertainment platforms incentivized to alter our neural circuitry, maximize engagement, and serve ads.
The Power Of IRL Presence: Is It The New Currency?
Compared to Attention, what makes Presence powerful? The answer lies in three fundamental truths that set it apart.
First: Presence is Higher Quality
Attention networks like Instagram are the largest ad networks. While they have shaped a multi-trillion dollar economy globally, they have some core problems.
Customer acquisition costs (CAC) have spiraled to unsustainable levels, spiraling up further as brands have only one core competitive advantage – to keep spending
These networks have meager yields. Less than 1% of the audience yields any real value, over-indexed for top creators and brands
Since these are ad-driven networks, they are not incentivized to build a transactions graph, and therefore, Attribution remains a core problem
But unlike digital Attention, which requires minimal commitment as the next video is just a flick away, IRL presence demands intention. Human beings are mimetic, and behavior spreads rapidly. When they gather in a similar state of mind, they are closer to the point of Influence and Conversion. This social proof manifests powerfully at peak events like the Super Bowl or a mega music concert like Coldplay, but it extends to all meaningful gatherings.
Second: Presence Explores the Ground Truth
Truth is increasingly fluid. As Marc Andreessen once observed, 'The internet is the first medium that has native skepticism built in'. As we scale up AI, the line between real vs unreal with synthetic content could continue to blur.
Yet amidst this growing uncertainty, IRL presence emerges as a rare constant. It represents perhaps the last bastion of undeniable truth: you were either present or not. There is no middle ground, no room for alternative facts. This could have huge implications for trust systems – offering unambiguous, verifiable ground truths, which could impact all brands dealing with Attribution and ROAS.
Facebook is known to have attempted to solve the Attribution problem by physically verifying which users walked into physical stores of brands after watching a campaign. Foursquare's pioneering work in location-based data was an early attempt to nail this.
In a world where digital truth is malleable, the question to ask would be: Can Presence become the new gold standard for truth, and can we build sophisticated IRL graphs?
Third: The Beauty of Ephemerality
Unlike digital metrics, IRL presence exists purely at the moment. This isn't a limitation – it's a feature. Unlike online distribution (extremely expensive, time-consuming, and low yield!), IRL presence urges authenticity and rich user context.
The larger question is – much like how our ancestors turned individual campfires in the first cities, points of light in the darkness that drew people together, can we take human presence and kindle it into a new fabric of connection?
IRL: Kindling a New Economy
The traditional sacred ratio of doing digital-first businesses – that a customer's LTV (lifetime value) ≈ 3-5X CAC (cost of acquiring them) – is starting to show its age. This long-term calculus may be missing something fundamental about how humans actually consume.
What if we could tap into something more immediate and powerful? Human gatherings – the collective moments of shared experiences – are not just social metrics, but billions of hours of synchronized human interactions and context. In these moments, people aren't just consumers; they're participants in a shared experience, influencing each other's choices and behaviors in real-time.
Hypothetically, if we moved to more short-term, urgent, and ephemeral transactional economics, where the short-term value (STV) >> SCAC (short-term CAC), and if we can keep acquiring consumers for every transaction, but at a much higher, and we can successfully do it over time, we could have a viable graph that actually works.
This is not fantasy. Live commerce, which is underwritten by a quasi-social graph, and an extremely popular consumer behavior in most of Asia – is a case in point. That market is touching $1 trillion annual GMV already in China
Could the IRL economy be significantly bigger, if we consider the entire IRL network, but more strongly, could be it much more viable? Is it a deeper opportunity – where our ability to tap into the context of human gatherings could unlock an entirely new kind of real-time commerce?
The Big Question Is – Who Gets To Light This Campfire?
Culture is upstream of distribution or product. Distribution is expensive and time-consuming to build, and the cost of building products is next to zero now so there is no native advantage there. Consumer applications, rooted in shaping behavior, could give a monumental alpha in bootstrapping an IRL network.
Partiful, a SF based a16z-backed party planning app, has the potential to do that. It is the cutting edge of culture, but I am not sure if that’s the direction it’s going to take. It the graph takes off, it could tap not just into Live Nation’s $20 billion ARR, but something much bigger.
But in my POV – the consumer category that has a huge potential to unlock an IRL-first graph is Travel. Travel is the OG of all human experiences and one of the most dense ephemeral networks. It is one of the largest cultural movements of our times, and every year, billions of trips are taken globally.
Today's travelers, on the other hand, aren't just looking for hotel rooms and flight tickets – they're searching for their fires to gather around. They seek inspiration and authentic experiences in a way that appeals to their present state of mind. More crucially, they're making decisions at the moment, particularly about in-destination experiences.
Yet here’s the paradox: when that moment of inspiration strikes, they face an experience that is dominated by search bars, listings, and filters, which create an overwhelming cognitive load. Today’s digital travel infrastructure is driven by marketplaces – which remain stubbornly rooted in commoditization and price discovery. IRL connections, on the other hand, are a bigger source of inspiration and social proof.
This brings us to the million-dollar question: If discovery is where the value accrues, what does an IRL graph look like that helps us determine ‘who we meet’ and ‘what we do’. Maybe Mozi, the new social travel company backed by Menlo Ventures will take a shot?
The stage is set for something revolutionary – not just a booking platform, but a truly discovery-first IRL graph, potentially spawning a reverse marketplace and contextual ad engine for the modern traveler.
And before I forget, wonder if hardware innovation and use cases have a role to play in this? ;)
The Cave Paintings of Tomorrow
Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors left handprints on prehistoric cave walls. These weren’t mere decorations – they were declarations of presence, saying powerfully – “we were here.” Today, these ancient marks still resonate, telling stories of human gatherings. Perhaps, its beauty lies in understanding their rhythm – the flowing patterns of how humans naturally connect.
The next chapter in human connection is waiting to be written. Like those ancient fires that drew our ancestors together, who is in for reimagining how we connect in real life?
