Down Round predictions & housekeeping
Down Round predictions & housekeeping
Grading my awful 2022 predictions & making some more anyways
Let’s kick off by self-reviewing my ten 2022 predictions, before moving on to more predictions for 2023.
What did I get right?
Democrats have a surprise win in the midterms, though I guessed this would have to do with resentments of the vaccinated against the anti-maskers, failing to anticipate Roe vs Wade.
The labor market for software developers loosened up, partially driven by global contract staffing.
Google Trends search interest in NFTs was down about 90% by the end of the year (I guessed 50%).
Bitcoin had the least volatile year on record (partially true?).
Everybody started taking psilocybin mushrooms.
And what did I entirely miss?
The private financing market did NOT remain hot (lmao).
There was no public tech valuation rebound.
I guessed a bunch of other stuff that didn’t happen because everyone stopped investing.
Russia, inflation, all the Elon drama… none of it was on my radar. The only one I feel pretty dumb about missing is inflation.
So overall those were some pretty bad misses, and I should be ashamed, and I am ashamed — however, I must say that the exercise of making them really got my blood pumping, so I’m going to do it again.
Without further ado, this year’s predictions are:
We do, more or less, have a soft landing.
ARKK is up 50% on the year.
A big narrative in tech (or maybe open secret) will be all of the zombie venture firms that are out of cash but in no position to raise new funds. This is a bigger topic than startups running out of money. Startups for the most part are able to raise, albeit on tough terms, and there are relatively few major startup blowups in 2023.
Hype around ChatGPT is somewhat more muted by the end of the year, but it’s still a major topic in tech and startupland.
Three of the following seven public SaaS companies will get taken private by Vista or Thoma Bravo or similar: Twilio, Blackline, PagerDuty, Box, Alteryx, RingCentral, Zuora.
The FAANGM company that has the best year will be Amazon.
Musk’s Twitter experiment more or less goes well, financially at least, providing air cover for even more tech layoffs and hiring freezes as investors push for slimmer payrolls. We’re going to hear “look what Elon did with 1/4th the headcount” a whole lot.
Self-driving gets sneaky good while no one is paying attention — it becomes relatively common to see one in several major cities.
BTC hovers between $15k and $25k all year and for the most part is not a major topic of public discussion.
Michigan football will win its 3rd straight Big Ten championship.
Books
Additionally, I wanted to share the books that I most enjoyed reading in 2022:
Lost in Summerland: Essays, by Barrett Swanson.
Life’s Work: A Memoir, by David Milch. Many thanks to Wilder for the recommendation.
The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, by Sam Quinones. I wrote a brief book review on this back in March.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman.
Please let me know if you’ve read any of these and enjoyed them.
And lastly, on the blog.
This April I migrated my blog onto Substack which had a pretty big impact on readership. Subscriber count approximately tripled, and total user sessions post-migration were around 7,000, which isn’t a whole lot but is certainly more than zero.
The most-viewed post (by far) was What caused the 2020 SaaS bubble and why is it now popping?, but the two posts that I got the most positive feedback on were One idea can take you pretty far and Staying in the Game.
Overall I really enjoyed the opportunity to share my thoughts (good and bad) with a wider circle. Thank you for reading, liking, commenting, subscribing, and/or sharing. I can’t wait to spend a lot more time on this in 2023.