Nicolas Colin has spent more than 15 years watching the current paradigm shift from inside the machine—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as the co-founder and director of a London-based investment firm during peak Silicon Valley optimism. That unusual path shaped his evolving perspective. In 2013, he was captivated by the idea of software eating the world. By 2019, he began questioning whether manufacturing still mattered (spoiler: it does). By 2023, he declared that “the door is closing on startups.” Today, he believes the world has entered technological maturity—where strategy matters more than innovation, where manufacturing eats software, and where China builds tomorrow’s infrastructure while the West clings to yesterday’s playbook. Living and working across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, and Munich 🇩🇪 has sharpened Colin’s view of Europe’s predicament: the continent abandoned manufacturing without capturing tech, leaving it stranded between paradigms. Watching China 🇨🇳 firsthand has also shaped his thinking about where real transformation happens—not in apps, but where software embeds in atoms. Colin’s framework—Late-Cycle Investment Theory—emerged from these observations and draws heavily on Carlota Perez’s work on technological revolutions. He shares this evolving analysis in Drift Signal and recently launched Currency of Power with Marieke Flament to track the emergence of a new global monetary order. Today, Colin oversees a portfolio of investments across three continents—a vantage point that reinforces, day by day, how late-cycle dynamics reshape value creation. He also serves on several boards where these same dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. Beyond his newsletter, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted, and Politico Europe. From Europe, Colin tracks patterns many miss: why innovation no longer protects, how institutions fragment under technological pressure, and where the next revolution emerges. After 250+ editions of Drift Signal, he is more convinced than ever that understanding where the world sits in the cycle changes everything.
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Episode 455
Nicolas Colin
Late-Cycle Investment Theory: Foundations for the Coming Decade | Nicolas Colin
Nicolas Colin has spent more than 15 years watching the current paradigm shift from inside the machine—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as the co-founder and director of a London-based investment firm during peak Silicon Valley optimism. That unusual path shaped his evolving perspective. In 2013, he was captivated by the idea of software eating the world. By 2019, he began questioning whether manufacturing still mattered (spoiler: it does). By 2023, he declared that “the door is closing on startups.” Today, he believes the world has entered technological maturity—where strategy matters more than innovation, where manufacturing eats software, and where China builds tomorrow’s infrastructure while the West clings to yesterday’s playbook. Living and working across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, and Munich 🇩🇪 has sharpened Colin’s view of Europe’s predicament: the continent abandoned manufacturing without capturing tech, leaving it stranded between paradigms. Watching China 🇨🇳 firsthand has also shaped his thinking about where real transformation happens—not in apps, but where software embeds in atoms. Colin’s framework—Late-Cycle Investment Theory—emerged from these observations and draws heavily on Carlota Perez’s work on technological revolutions. He shares this evolving analysis in Drift Signal and recently launched Currency of Power with Marieke Flament to track the emergence of a new global monetary order. Today, Colin oversees a portfolio of investments across three continents—a vantage point that reinforces, day by day, how late-cycle dynamics reshape value creation. He also serves on several boards where these same dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. Beyond his newsletter, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted, and Politico Europe. From Europe, Colin tracks patterns many miss: why innovation no longer protects, how institutions fragment under technological pressure, and where the next revolution emerges. After 250+ editions of Drift Signal, he is more convinced than ever that understanding where the world sits in the cycle changes everything.
In Episode 455 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nicolas Colin, a former French Treasury official and the co-founder of a European startup accelerator whose work sits at the intersection of technology, markets, geopolitics, and global finance.
In the first hour of their conversation, Kofinas and Colin break down Colin’s “Late Cycle Investment Theory” and the framework behind it. They draw on Carlota Perez’s model of technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms, explore the role of speculative manias and market concentration, and examine why Colin argues that AI is less a brand-new technological revolution than an intensification of the computing-and-network paradigm that has been unfolding for the past 50 years. They also compare the current moment to the 1970s as a historical analogue and discuss why Colin believes financial systems are often the last piece to be rebuilt after a major paradigm shift.
In the second hour, Kofinas and Colin explore what this late-cycle thesis means for investors, the public, and the geostrategic competition between the United States and China. They discuss how tokenization and programmable money could reshape the global financial system’s infrastructure, and how today’s “Trump Shock” might be the opening move in a broader financial reset.
They also examine what financial fragmentation between two competing spheres—one led by China and one by the U.S.—may look like in practice, why programmable grid infrastructure and a new scale of electrification may be leading candidates for the next technological revolution, and what all of this implies for public debt servicing, inflation, financial repression, and wealth redistribution as proximity services replace the factory floor as the central battleground over which a new social contract will be formed.
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Nicolas Colin has spent more than 15 years watching the current paradigm shift from inside the machine—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as the co-founder and director of a London-based investment firm during peak Silicon Valley optimism.
That unusual path shaped his evolving perspective. In 2013, he was captivated by the idea of software eating the world. By 2019, he began questioning whether manufacturing still mattered (spoiler: it does). By 2023, he declared that “the door is closing on startups.” Today, he believes the world has entered technological maturity—where strategy matters more than innovation, where manufacturing eats software, and where China builds tomorrow’s infrastructure while the West clings to yesterday’s playbook.
Living and working across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, and Munich 🇩🇪 has sharpened Colin’s view of Europe’s predicament: the continent abandoned manufacturing without capturing tech, leaving it stranded between paradigms. Watching China 🇨🇳 firsthand has also shaped his thinking about where real transformation happens—not in apps, but where software embeds in atoms.
Colin’s framework—Late-Cycle Investment Theory—emerged from these observations and draws heavily on Carlota Perez’s work on technological revolutions. He shares this evolving analysis in Drift Signal and recently launched Currency of Power with Marieke Flament to track the emergence of a new global monetary order.
Today, Colin oversees a portfolio of investments across three continents—a vantage point that reinforces, day by day, how late-cycle dynamics reshape value creation. He also serves on several boards where these same dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. Beyond his newsletter, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted, and Politico Europe.
From Europe, Colin tracks patterns many miss: why innovation no longer protects, how institutions fragment under technological pressure, and where the next revolution emerges. After 250+ editions of Drift Signal, he is more convinced than ever that understanding where the world sits in the cycle changes everything.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
