24 predictions for 2024
Play bingo with me
Apple advertises ethical AI: whether it’s based on paying rights holders for content or privacy-first AI, Apple will try to differentiate its AI with ethics.
Biden will win re-election: people will remember how much Trump sucks once everything becomes presidential campaign 24/7.
News media will have a banner year because of the election. The “woke NYT is dying” narrative will get replaced with “MSM wants to elect Trump” narrative.
Dune and Furiosa will be masterpieces and non-Marvel blockbusters will reign. It will be a glorious year for desert-based science fiction epics.
Nothing meaningful will happen with Twitter (ownership, bankruptcy, product, stability, etc).
The indie startup movement and “not so small” businesses will go fully mainstream. “Control your destiny with optionality for future fundraises and something really big” will become the common refrain.
The Series A market will still be largely closed. People want cheap risk (seed) or to pay for quality growth (late stage). Series A will be the worst of both.
VCs will talk a big game about being so back but the deal making environment basically won’t change from the anemic 2023. This will be especially true about their purported openness to doing Series A rounds (see above).
Crypto funding will catch up to the crypto public markets bull even if the companies are increasingly not branded as web 3 or crypto, just as software.
Stripe will file to go public. Holiday ’23 was very strong for them, they’re profitable, they’re growing, and interest rates are coming down. This is the best window they’ll get.
Space X/Starlink won’t go public. They don’t need it for liquidity or capital raising and Elon will choose to punt it.
Tech take-privates will boom. Lots of companies went public broken in the ZIRP era and will need to be fixed away from the harsh light of public markets.
We’ll find out that Sam Altman was fired-not-fired for some kind of weird but relatively minor conflict of interest
AAA AI video games will get announced by major publishers. They won’t risk marquee titles yet but they’ll use gen AI to differentiate a piece of (new) IP.
We’ll get studies showing crazy GLP-1 benefits well beyond weight loss or even consumptive behavior.
A bunch of big venture platforms funds will announce smaller funds and narrower mandates even as they reach further and further out to find new capital.
A bunch of smaller funds will shut down entirely. Some will merge.
We get a new magnificent 7 mega deal: Lina khan is struggling (Figma is a red herring bc of mkt conditions) and one of them will try their luck with a huge deal.
Tesla will start doing paid advertising. It’s looking more and more like a regular car company and this is just the next step.
We’ll have several LK-99 style events. Renewed interest in hard tech means that anything that looks like it could be significant will get hyped and memed. It won’t just be superconductors.
There will be more large scale venture-funded buyouts and rollups, especially of the “GBO” (software co buys an operating co) variety.
Bryan Johnson will ascend as the godhead.
AI will enable the products of big companies and the businesses of small ones. Smallcos can’t build the best AI (models or products) but they can use it most effectively. The opposite will be true for Bigcos.
I will bench two plates (for reps).