Five Years Into “SoLoMo”

In 2010, John Doerr coined the term “SoLoMo,” the combination of social , local, and mobile. Doerr, who correctly called and invested in technology’s two previous waves (personal computing and networking, and Internet 1.o like Amazon and Google), now believed SoLoMo was the next wave.

And, now in 2015, looking back, he was absolutely right, though not always in the exact ways in which he envisioned.

• Social: For instance, it turns out our phones, phone numbers, and various messaging apps (like Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp) are social but not because of Facebook or Twitter’s graph, but because of our phones being social devices themselves.
• Local: We have spent the past five (5) years basically using mobile phones to rewrite and reinvent the local goods and services delivery model. Pick any consumer behavior which occurs which some frequency — transportation, buying food, laundry, home & office cleaning, parking cars and valets, dog boarding and dog walking, and so many others. Most people spend their money within a specific radius of their home, and with phones, entrepreneurs have built entirely new consumer brands (with Uber leading the way, of course) to reinvent local.
• Mobile: This is the easy one, as we’re doing all of this on our phones. This was the main driver of the trend. In 2010, we all didn’t realize how much of a driver, as in 2015, it all seems obvious now.

Looking back on the creation of the acronym in 2010, which also became a bit of a joke given how it sounds, it’s pretty clear to me it was spot-on and prescient. How it all unfolded was a bit different, and it’s still happening, creating multiple billion-dollar companies almost out of thin air.