The future isn’t happening to us

Something has shifted in how people relate to the future. The sense that the big decisions are being made by systems and that there are concentrations of power most people cannot get near. The options available don’t inspire much confidence: disengage, or push against things that barely move.

Rachel Yang, a Partner at Giant Leap, wrote about a different possibility for Startup Daily. Below is an extended edition.

By Rachel Yang

The world is moving faster than most of us can properly comprehend. Geopolitically, technologically, economically, everything feels simultaneously accelerated and unstable.

Even those of us whose work involves backing the future for a living can find ourselves bracing rather than imagining. The future is beginning to feel less like something we shape and more like something that happens to us.

With this in mind, I recently attended the Wisdom and Action conference on the topic Trust in the Age of AI, expecting to leave more despondent than I arrived. I didn’t. The conference opened with a rebuttal.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, wrote her own job description as a poem. She is one of the most thoughtful voices in the world on how technology can serve public participation rather than replace it, and she spent the next forty minutes making a case for why the people in that room had more power than they assumed.

In 2014, Taiwan’s parliament tried to push through a trade agreement with Beijing without the scrutiny most of the country thought it deserved. Half a million people took to the streets, and students occupied the parliament for three weeks. “We’re not protesting, we’re demonstrating,” Audrey said.

The occupation, known as the Sunflower Movement, was organised around small group conversations, where someone who profoundly disagreed with you was someone you could still actually talk to rather than shout past. Audrey described the difference as a campfire versus a wildfire: small enough to gather around, not large enough to consume everyone. After three weeks, the occupiers converged on a coherent set of demands, and the Speaker of Parliament accepted them. “The people’s version is better,” he said. It became one of the very few Occupy-style movements in modern history that ended in agreement rather than exhaustion.

The design principle running through this, Audrey said, runs directly against the logic of every platform most of us use every day. Social media is not built to help people understand each other. It is built to hold attention, and what holds attention best is emotions like outrage and fear.

The more people participate in that system, the further apart they move. It does not create campfires. It is very good at manufacturing the impression that we agree on nothing, that the most extreme position represents the whole, and that coming together is naive.

When Taiwan was hit by a wave of deepfake scam ads in 2024, the government again resisted the instinct to respond from the top down. Instead, they sent 200,000 text messages to randomly selected citizens asking what should be done. From those responses, 447 people were chosen as a representative cross-section of the country and seated at tables of ten.

For your idea to become part of the national agenda, you had to convince the other nine people at your table, including people who had arrived with a completely different view. That single condition changed what people optimised for. You were not incentivised to take the typical politician approach of performing for a crowd or looking for the most shareable framing. You were trying to find something that held up when tested against someone who disagreed with you, face to face.

The mechanism for expressing priorities across the full range of issues was quadratic voting. Rather than one person, one vote, participants allocated a fixed number of points, where casting two votes on something costs four points and three votes costs nine. You can shout, but shouting is expensive. The system forces you toward ideas others can get behind, because concentrating your votes on one position costs you influence everywhere else.

The ideas that survived were the ones that were actually going to be the most effective rather than the most emotive ones.

The resulting policies became law within two months. These policies changed the incentives, for example, if Meta published a scam advertisement where someone lost $5 million, then Meta would be liable for that $5 million. As a result, deepfake ad impersonation reportedly fell by more than 94%.

The conviction underneath all of it was the same: people are more capable than institutions tend to assume. “We the people are already the superintelligence,” Audrey said.

What her examples keep demonstrating is that the people closest to a problem, living inside it and feeling its friction, consistently produce better solutions than those deciding on their behalf from a distance. Algorithms are excellent at pattern matching, but they cannot feel the urgency of a broken system or the specific shape of a gap that needs filling. That principle doesn’t stop at civic governance. It’s why we back founders who have lived inside a problem. Proximity to pain is a form of expertise that cannot be outsourced, simulated, or calculated. We call it founder-market fit.

The determinism many of us feel right now is partly manufactured by overwhelm: by pace, by complexity, and by a set of stories that centre the people with the most power while minimising the agency of everyone else.

But the future is not decided.

The founders we want to back at Giant Leap are working inside that space. They are close enough to the systems they want to change to understand their constraints, their failures, and the people those failures affect. They are operators, clinicians, teachers, workers, patients, parents and builders who have lived with a problem long enough to see what others miss.

If that is what you are building, come and find us.

Audrey’s job description:

When we see Internet of things, let’s make it an Internet of beings.

When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

Always the machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Always the user experience, let’s make it about human experience.

And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let’s always remember the plurality is there.

🌐 Ian Bremmer spent 20 years arguing that open societies were more stable than closed ones. He now says that’s wrong. When the internet was new, it helped citizens. People could organise, find information and hold governments to account. Now the platforms running our information are built to maximise engagement, which means outrage and fear. Governments can track citizens at scale. Algorithms decide what you see and what you believe. That architecture suits authoritarian systems far better than democratic ones. Read more here or listen here (What Now? With Trevor Noah) or here (Diary of CEO with Steven Bartlett). Thanks Ananya Dave for sharing these links with us!

🩺 Melinda French Gates went through menopause and still had to fight for her own care. She wrote an essay in The New York Times setting out how widespread the failure is. Nearly one in three US women over 40 experience severe symptoms; only one in four gets treated. She’s committing US$215 million to change that.

💊 Single women on GLP-1s were 29% more likely to form new partnerships after six quarters. Non-employed women were 27% more likely to find work. A working paper found neither effect appeared in existing relationships or jobs. Women didn’t report feeling healthier or happier. The only thing that changed was who they were meeting for the first time.

🌍 30% of global CO2 emissions are now covered by a carbon price, up from 7% in 2010. The remaining 71% isn’t priced at all.

🤖 Knowing a video is fake doesn’t stop it from changing how you feel about the person in it. Researchers showed deepfakes of Nancy Pelosi and a Dutch politician to 3,000+ adults. The clips were so extreme that most viewers spotted them as fake, but their reputations dropped anyway. The effect was strongest among supporters: the people who liked them most were hit hardest.

🧠 The key to creativity is how long you’re willing to sit with the problem. Most of us hit a problem, feel the discomfort of not knowing, and reach for our phone. Or Claude. The uncertainty disappears. So does the possibility of something original. Research from Berkeley put numbers on it: the most creative professionals across fields weren’t more talented than their peers. They just spent more time playing with the problem.

🌱 Australia is funding climate innovation, but it’s not buying it. BloombergNEF estimates the net-zero transition opportunity at US$1.9 trillion by 2050, and Australia has the minerals, the renewables and the capital. Too few domestic businesses are willing to be first customers, so the best founders are finding them overseas. The economic value tends to follow.

20 tips from a Seth Godin masterclass on building an audience: for those building something and thinking about how to find the people who will care about it.

Innovation Bay’s Periodic Table of the Australian Startup Ecosystem: a visual map of the people, organisations and resources that make up Australia’s startup scene

Clinical Advisors’ Australian Healthtech Funding FY26: a detailed look at Australian healthtech funding in FY2026 including deal flow, investors, and what the headline numbers actually hide.

🤖 Indi is hiring a Design Engineer and a Full Stack AI Engineer (Sydney).

🌱 Trace is hiring a Sales Development Representative (SDR) (Sydney, hybrid).

🧻 Who Gives a Crap is hiring a Head of Brand and Growth (US), Head of Growth Marketing (UK), Performance Creative Lead (US), Field Sales Representative (UK), National Account Manager - Aldi & New Business, 9-month contract (Australia), and Graphic Designer - Retail & B2B, 6-month contract (Australia).

⚡ Amber is hiring across several roles including a Software Engineering Manager (Optimisation Team), Customer Operations Manager (Voice Team), Customer Experience Specialist (Voice Team) and Strategic Account Manager (Europe).

📅 2 July: Stone & Chalk and Cremorne Digital Hub’s Ecosystem Mixer: Community Island - Melbourne. An evening connecting communities, hubs and sub-groups across the Victorian startup scene. Register here.

📅 3 July: Aussie Founders Club’s Startup Sips: EOFY Edition - Melbourne. Drinks, founders and no agenda. Join the waitlist.

📅 8 July: The Community Collective’s Community Coworking Day - Richmond VIC. Coworking and connection at Sanders Place. Pay what you feel — donations go to Forever Projects. Register here.

📅 8 July: Antler’s VC Unlocked - online. A free online masterclass for women founders. Register here.

📅 14 July: Startup Meetups Melbourne’s Startup Networking & Fireside Chat with Kunal Kalro - South Melbourne. Networking and a fireside chat with the founder of Eugene, a healthtech company using genomics to shift healthcare from reactive to preventive. Register here.

📅 15 July: Aussie Founders Club’s From Idea to Shipped - Melbourne. A panel on validating and shipping fast, without a CTO. Apply to attend. Register here.

📅 16 July: EnergyLab’s Startup Survival Guide: What I Wish I Knew - Sydney. Four founders on what they’d tell themselves at the start. Register here.

📅 22 July: 77 Partners’ Y Combinator Insights for Australian Founders - online. A practical AMA with YC alumni on what makes applications cut through, common pitfalls, and tips specific to ANZ founders. Worth noting: the Fall 2026 YC deadline is 28 July. Register here.