Ten Predictions for 2022
I'm a week late, but here are my ten predictions for 2022 politics, investing, and technology.
Democrats win the midterms, shockingly, even as everyone predicts a Republican sweep. The key narrative is "the fury of the vaccinated" as mounting anger against anti-vax/anti-maskers drives Dems to the polls. Nobody talks about “the resentments of the white working class voter” anymore, and all the J.D. Vance-style candidates get blown out.
Top 10 Public SaaS valuations rebound significantly. Snowflake hits $600.
Solo VC funds (e.g. Lachy Groom, Caffeinated Capital, etc) lead several $500m+ rounds of funding into startups. Overall the private financing market remains hot, and "speed to term sheet" continues to be the key differentiator.
The line between entrepreneurs and investors continues to blur. Not just in the form of founders participating in angel/venture investing, but also in investors beginning to look more like founders (by incubating businesses, creating side projects, developing new types of investment vehicles, etc.)
“No-code” tooling (e.g. Bubble, Webflow, Airtable) is now good enough that the many non-technical founders can raise a seed round with a working prototype they produced without a developer. Another emerging VC narrative is “non-technical founder raises $25m with no plans to hire a CTO”. This pisses a lot of people off.
Salaries for software developers in North America start drifting downward as the infrastructure is now available to onboard competitive talent from places like South America, Central Europe, and maybe Africa. This also pisses a lot of people off.
Crypto predictions: Something happens in crypto/web3 payments that frightens the incumbent SaaS+payments ecosystem (Toast, etc). Bitcoin has the least volatile year on record (ends the year between $30k and $50k). The number of people with crypto wallets increases by 4x, but the average person still isn’t sure what the point of any of this is. Google Trends search interest in NFTs is down 50% by the end of the year.
The Coinbase manifesto (soft-banning political speech at work) happens at at least 3 other prominent public tech companies in the $10-100B market cap range. Public backlash is surprisingly muted.
The predominant narrative around Elon Musk is related to Starlink, not Tesla.
All of the sudden, everyone you know starts taking psilocybin mushrooms.
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