The name’s Bond. James Bond.” The British actor Daniel Craig will say those famous lines for the last time in the next 007 film — Bond 25. According to some reports, Craig’s final Bond film, might be titled Shatterhand, the code name of villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Ian Fleming’s 1964 novel, You Only Live Twice. The only people who know the real title are producer Barbara Broccoli and director Cary Joji Fukunaga, and they’re not talking. What we do know is that Christoph Waltz will play Blofeld and filming is taking place now in the town of Gravina, in southern Italy.
Bond. There’s something very satisfying about that name. Something strong, something solid. Perhaps that’s why Mary Meeker decided to call her new fund Bond Capital. Meeker joined the star Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2010 after two decades in New York as a managing director at Morgan Stanley, the multinational investment bank and financial services company. As a well-known Wall Street tech analyst, she quickly climbed the Silicon Valley ladder to become one of the few women to receive a general partner title, at Kleiner Perkins, in an industry where women traditionally have been shut out from the top jobs.
Meeker, during her Kleiner Perkins time, was responsible for several of the firm’s biggest investments, including Airbnb, Uber and Slack. With Bond Capital, she has already made history by launching the first female-founded, female-led venture capital firm to raise $1.25 billion (€1.1 billion), according to the tech news website Axios.com.
Mary Meeker is known to millions of people around the world, not because of her venture capital role, however, but because of her deck. Her what? Her PowerPoint deck. Since its debut in 1987, PowerPoint has become one of the most popular presentation programs in the world, and like other popular software tools, PowerPoint has its own terminology. The term “deck” has come to mean “the group of slides that make up your presentation”. So, when a colleague asks you to show her your deck, she’s specifically looking for your collection of PowerPoint slides.
Mary Meeker delivered her annual “Internet Trends” report, the most eagerly awaited deck in Silicon Valley, at the Code Conference. The 333-page slide show examined every important internet trend in the past year and looked at what these trends can tell us to expect in the year ahead. Four examples:
- Almost 51 per cent of the world’s population (3.8 billion people) were internet users last year, up from 49 per cent (3.6 billion) in 2017.
- The number of interactive gamers worldwide grew six per cent, to 2.4 billion players, last year, as games like Fortnite become the new social media for many people.
- Healthcare is gradually becoming more digitized. We can expect more telemedicine and on-demand consultations in the future.
- Images are increasingly the way with which people communicate. Faster Wi-Fi and better phone cameras are encouraging people take and share more photos.
There’s one big word on the first slide in Mary Meeker’s deck: “Bond”. But her presentation is not only for the eyes of British Secret Service agents like 007. We can all view it here: www.bondcap.com/#view/1