Author: Rex Woodbury
Compiled by: TechFlow TechFlow
TechFlow Dive: Rex Woodbury of Daybreak Ventures outlines key trends for early 2026 using 10 charts.
Key findings:
(1) Newspaper stocks plummeted five years ago when earnings declined, and SaaS stocks are now repeating that scenario;
(2) 84% of humans have never used AI, and only 0.3% have paid for it;
(3) The usage time of AI applications has surged, competing with Netflix and TikTok for time;
(4) Healthcare accounts for 15% of U.S. employment and drives nearly 100% of job growth;
(5) The secondary market and IPO/M&A are developing in parallel;
(6) Gen Z's "financial nihilism": First-time homebuyers are on average 40 years old, so why not take a gamble;
(7) Retatrutide (Lilly's new drug) could be a trillion-dollar peptide;
(8) The gaming market is worth $200 billion, and Roblox has higher user engagement than Steam, PS and Fortnite;
(9) Anthropic agent calls 50% of the software engineering;
(10) Citrini research report triggers market panic selling - we live in a meme economy.
The full text is as follows:
It's that time of year again: time for another installment of the "10 Charts" series.
I try to do this quarterly, but we're already overdue: the last one was in October . This is our 11th (!), and you know the rule: I'm a visual learner, and charts help me process information. Charts also happen to be an effective way to show how the world is changing.
We will work on 10 charts covering a wide range of topics:
- Newspaper Stocks vs. Profits
- Still the first game
- AI application usage time
- Healthcare drives employment
- Secondary market reshapes VC + employee rewards
- Gen Z: The last generation in the alphabet
- Peptides and Reta
- Game Status
- Calling for more Agent calls
- Citrini sell-off
Without further ado...
Newspaper Stocks vs. Profits
This chart shows a comparison between newspaper stock and earnings. You can see that the stock plummeted about five years before earnings declined, meaning the market saw the words on the wall before they even appeared on the profit and loss statement.
Source: Twitter; Thanks to Emily Man for sending.
Of course, there's some timing skew; the decline in forward earnings coincided with the Great Recession. But the direction seems accurate, with the market anticipating the internet's disruption of newspapers. We're seeing this again now, with SaaS stocks plummeting last month ahead of AI disruption.
As we wrote last week , the SaaS pocalypse (the end of SaaS) will take time to unfold. I attended a panel discussion this week where one panelist quipped, "Campbell's Tom isn't going to vibe-code their own CRM," which is a clever remark. But the market is pricing in an eventual reality: compressed software margins, with the "new normal" being 70% gross margins instead of 90%.
The topic of AI requires a long time to develop...
Still the first game
This is a cool visualization of where we are in the AI adoption cycle. Each dot below represents 3.2 million people. There are 2,500 dots, totaling 8.1 billion people.
- Gray = 6.8 billion people who have never used AI
- Green = 1.3 billion free users
- Yellow = 15-35 million paying users
- Red = 2-5 million coded users
Source: Noah Epstein on Twitter
Approximately 84% of the world has never used AI, and only 0.3% (!) have paid for AI products. This is the best visualization I've ever seen of "we're still in the early stages."
AI application usage time
In the previous version of 10 charts , we looked at ChatGPT's "smile curve":
From that article:
This chart commits what I call "y-axis crime," meaning the y-axis misleadingly doesn't start from zero. But in this case, y-axis crime actually hurts ChatGPT! The curve is even better when you realize the worst group asymptotes in their 40s (and then "smile").
These types of curves are typically reserved for market or social products with network effects, meaning they improve as more users join the platform (e.g., Uber improves with increased rider/driver density, or Instagram improves with more of your friends on the app). For a standalone product that hasn't launched social features, having this kind of retention rate is impressive.
In addition to improved retention rates, AI applications are also seeing improved engagement . Here's a visual representation of this trend line:
Overall, this is a very impressive increase in usage.
In 2017, Netflix's Reed Hastings famously said that Netflix's biggest competitor is sleep. Netflix's business is about absorbing more and more viewing time (more viewing time = better subscriber retention + willingness to pay), so naturally sleep directly conflicts with its business model.
We are now seeing media usage time plateauing at approximately 12.75 hours per day.
The increased use of AI must come at the cost of time spent elsewhere. Perhaps Claude's biggest competitor is sleep? I also imagine Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, and others watching the AI usage charts above with caution. Half an hour on Gemini is half an hour without watching short videos. AI tools are clearly more than just Google alternatives; they are also social + content products. Just wait until generated media truly takes off, and we'll see large existing companies facing immense pressure on engagement metrics.
Healthcare drives employment
Healthcare is the largest employment category in the United States, accounting for approximately 15% of employment. It is the engine behind almost all job growth . See this chart:
Overall, healthcare will drive about 40% of new jobs over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, the fastest growing single job in the U.S. is “home health aide,” driven by a rapidly aging population (10,000 Americans turn 65 every day).
Healthcare benefits from several major tailwinds:
- LLM is well-suited for healthcare administration, a trillion-dollar market, because healthcare relies on language to function.
- Consumers are increasingly willing to measure, personalize, and spend on their health.
- Telemedicine is expanding healthcare access, driven by new regulations that broaden coverage in the post-pandemic era.
- Our population is getting older and sicker. "Silver tsunami," and so on.
Many medical jobs are also "AI protected," which I think means we'll see more young people entering the medical field.
Secondary market reshapes VC + employee rewards
This is an undervalued shift in venture capital. The secondary market is now on par with IPOs and M&A exits:
Source: Tomasz Tunguz on Twitter
This has changed the game for early-stage funds like Daybreak and startup employees. Liquidity timelines are compressed. I wouldn't be surprised if we return multiple times the fund's capital by selling shares in growth-stage funding rounds. This isn't new—IA Ventures' Roger Ehrenberg has publicly spoken about selling approximately 2.5 million of The Trade Desk's roughly 6.6 million shares in a secondary sale to return capital to LPs—but it's becoming more common.
On the employee side, employees won't have to wait over 10 years for some liquidity. Clay and ElevenLabs have each completed two takeover bids in the past 12 months, while Anthropic is currently undertaking a $6 billion (!) takeover bid. The latter will undoubtedly make a splash in the San Francisco real estate market.
Gen Z: The last generation in the alphabet
Kalshi reports that betting volume on Super Bowl Sunday exceeded $1 billion , a 2700% year-over-year increase (!). Here's a chart showing pre-Super Bowl prediction market trading volume, indicating a 1205% increase in trading volume over six months:
These markets are new and controversial. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended a briefing in early January, raising questions about insider trading.
During the Super Bowl, my partner bet a little money on Cardi B's performance with Bad Bunny after she appeared on stage. He then lost the bet, and Kalshi said the performer had to sing for it to be considered a "performance." This led to at least one complaint being filed with the CFTC. This is the Wild West!
But despite the controversy, I believe prediction markets will survive. Last fall, we wrote in Speculation Nation about the forces behind the rise of prediction markets. That article focused on the enabling technologies that collide with Gen Z behavior, including the rise of FAFOnomics (FAFO = Fuck Around and Find Out).
My friend Jackson Denka wrote an interesting article this week titled "Financial Nihilism or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Markets." He called Gen Z "the last generation of the alphabet," which struck me. He cited some statistics:
- The unemployment rate for US college graduates in 2025 is projected to be 9.3% , higher than during the major financial crisis.
- The wealthiest 1% of families own nearly 30% of the country's total wealth.
- The average age of first-time homebuyers is now 40.
No wonder we're becoming a speculative economy? If upward economic liquidity is Sisyphus-like, then why not gamble everything for the chance to get rich? Note: This isn't a good thing, but I think it's one of the defining undercurrents of the next generation.
Peptides and Reta
In the clamor surrounding AI, it's easy to overlook other seismic shifts. One area I've been spending a lot of time on is peptides, which are starting to gain mainstream attention.
Peptides are amino acid chains that form signaling molecules in your body. The most well-known peptides are Ozempic and Wegovy, the brand name for the peptide semaglutide. The peptide market is booming because consumers are showing genuine interest and a willingness to pay. My friend Khushi put it well in this tweet:
Our first investment in 2026 is in System Labs , a peptide company that launched last week. There's a significant opportunity to demystify peptides for everyday consumers and become a trusted source of reliable, safe peptides in the U.S.
You can see the market's expected growth here:
The most underrated drug right now is Retatrutide , or Reta . Eli Lilly is developing Reta, a triple agonist, while Ozempic is a single agonist; in fancy terms, Reta targets three receptors: GLP-1, GIP, and Glucagon. This means the drug enhances satiety, improves insulin sensitivity, and increases metabolic rate (fat burning). Ozempic is only GLP-1, so it primarily focuses on reducing appetite.
Reta is a potential trillion-dollar drug. Here's a chart showing Reta's weight loss benefits:
Source: CTCD
I look forward to hearing more about Reta soon.
Game Status
Matthew Ball released a lengthy report on the state of the game last week. Here are some highlights:
Gaming remains the largest media category, with annual spending of $200 billion , exceeding the combined spending on film, television, and music. After a brief decline following the COVID-19 pandemic, growth has recovered.
Mobile is driving most of the growth in gaming:
Despite market growth, venture capital funding has declined significantly since its post-COVID-19 peak.
AI will reshape games, although this hasn't really happened yet (we're still largely in the AI-driven text phase). Soon, game generation rather than rendering will become the norm, opening up new possibilities for narrative and world-building.
Returning to our earlier point about AI applications competing with sleep and Netflix: we might also see AI applications encroaching on gaming time. This tweet resonated with me:
The most impressive company in the game remains Roblox, which has driven a large part of the game's growth:
Roblox now has 150 million daily active users, and you can see here that the percentage of users aged 13 and over is growing particularly fast:
Roblox's average engagement now exceeds the combined engagement of Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite.
Calling for more Agent calls
This is an interesting chart showing the Anthropic agent's usage across various industries:
Clearly, there are huge opportunities for agents outside of software engineering. Or, as Garry Tan put it:
As for what will happen to these categories of jobs: I think the labor shock will be more gradual. We've written a lot about Jevons' paradox here. To give another example, here's a great visual from Coatue about ATMs:
People believed that ATMs would destroy bank teller jobs. Instead, from 1970 to 1988, the number of bank tellers increased by 81% , enjoying four decades of steady growth.
Citrini sell-off
Another week, another viral blog post. This week it's Citrini's Substack post , which triggered a market sell-off:
What's crazy to me is that a casual article about the future, without any factual or data basis, can trigger such widespread market panic. To me, this is a sign that (1) the market is overheated and looking for reasons to correct , and (2) we have officially entered the meme economy.
I found this article rather naive. Fintech and market companies are harder to disrupt than Citrini's article suggests. DoorDash's Tony Xu offered a good response .
The real lesson from the Citrini sell-off: Nobody knows exactly what will happen.
