USV partner Fred Wilson, lays out his annual forecast
[WHAT]
] Fred Wilson @ avc.com - predicts the year ahead in the technology industry. Fred is a partner at Union Square Ventures, a NYC based Venture Capital firm. Here is a quick summary list of what those predictions are ...
*] NOTE - that I have tagged each of the predictions with the startup sector, that the predcition falls into ( Example Mobile, Messaging, Payments, ...) This will make it easier to group multiple predictions later
] Trump will hit the ground running, cutting corporate and personal taxes, and eliminating the preferential treatment of carried interest capital gains.
] The IPO market, led by Snapchat, will be white hot. Look for entrepreneurs and the VCs that back them to have IPO fever in 2017. I expect we will see more tech IPOs in 2017 than we have since 2000.
] The ad:tech market will go the way of search, social, and mobile as investors and entrepreneurs concede that Google and Facebook have won and everyone else has lost.
] The SAAS sector will continue to consolidate, driven by a trifecta of legacy enterprise software companies (like Oracle), successful SAAS companies (like Workday), and private equity firms all going in search of additional lines of business and recurring subscription revenue streams.
] AI will be the new mobile. Investors will ask management what their “AI strategy” is before investing and will be wary of companies that don’t have one.
] Tech investors will start to adopt genomics as an additional “information technology” investment category, blurring the distinction between life science and tech investors that has existed in the VC sector for the past thirty years.
] Google, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Apple and Amazon will be seen as monopolists by government and individuals in the US (as they have been for years outside the US).
] Cyberwarfare will be front and center in our lives in the same way that nuclear warfare was during the cold war.