Membership clubs & desktop apps are back.

Musing #16 | And more things I talked about over coffee & dinner this week.

Since what I write about is often inspired by the conversations I have, I figured why not immortalize a few of the recent topics and thoughts here. These are mostly from 1:1 and small group discussions plus one more formal dinner party for women in NYC consumer tech — a mix of founders, operators, and investors.

5 things on people + culture:

Membership clubs are cool again. The trend that was about to happen just before COVID is back on track and bigger as a post-isolation rebound. People are craving belonging to private or semi-private communities. (At the same time, people are overwhelmed with online content consumption, especially streaming subs.) People seem excited about paid membership clubs, online and offline, that they’d happily pay a subscription to belong to.

People are much less willing to do things they don’t want to do anymore. I think this has been amplified by the COVID/post-COVID phenomenon of feeling like you, your interests, and your family and friends are all that mat…