2023 Startup Prediction Recap

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Happy Tuesday and 2024, folks.

Can’t believe our planet is now more than 2000 years old… crazy.

I’d say that I hope you are all refreshed and ready to take on this new year, fully energized and motivated, but if you’re anything like me, you’re more tired than you were at any point in 2023.

Would be lying if I said I’m not pumped for this year, though. Have a feeling that it’s going to be a good one. Excited to see all of you win. Let’s get this bread ig 🍞

Looking at last year’s 2023 predictions…

I had the brilliant idea to publish my boldest predictions for this year last New Year’s, and as promised, let’s review.

They are… not great?

But alas, I’m a man of my word if nothing else, so expose my bad takes we must.

Energy

This section wasn’t the boldest, admittedly. I predicted that the market would continue to experience growth. How novel.

This is a long recap straight outta the White House on how the year was for Green Energy (make sure to consider the source of this info and scale your takeaways down by ~50%), but in bullet form:

• Solar and Wind carried the sector, driven by lower costs and greater efficiency (✅)

• More favorable legislation for the sector like the reversal of the Chinese solar panel import ban (✅)

• EVs topped 1 million vehicles sold in the US, up more than 50% YoY (✅)

• There are more EVs on the market than ever, and they’re more accessible than ever. Many manufacturers are also adopting Tesla’s charging infrastructure, indicating further growth moving forward (✅)

• I was (am) bullish on nuclear, and though I am still waiting to see final venture numbers for the sector, Sama took his nuclear company public, and uranium (critical input) saw a 55% rise (❓️)

• Expected the anti-ESG movement to be more pronounced. It was definitely a story in the first half of the year (165 bills against ESG investment criteria introduced in 37 states, 83 failed), but it has been a minute since I’ve heard a Congressman saying we need to stop being so woke and investing in green companies, ignoring the fact that these investments performed considerably better than funds that were “anti-ESG” lol (❓️)

• I predicted that geopolitical concerns would lead to nationalization movements that benefited non-fossil fuel energy, and this was true, particularly in nuclear (✅)

Consumer

Easily my worst set of predictions of the bunch… all misses, no hits:

• I predicted that we’d get the next big social app, and it remains to be seen whether Threads can be that? Can of Soup has potential, too, but we didn’t see any rapid ascension a la TikTok 2020 (❌)

• Double miss: also thought TikTok would finally get the boot. Whoops lol (❌)

• Possibly my proudest prediction was a merger in the streaming space, and what do you know? Warner Bros and Paramount are getting all cozy. Did it officially happen? No. But I feel more conviction in consolidation in the space than ever. (❓️)

• Said Netflix would get into live sports through buying a league’s rights straight up which missed. They did invest further into their sports docs and did host a live golf tournament featuring popular athletes from some of these series (❌)

• Thought Disney would finally sell ESPN, and it didn’t happen. We actually got a look at the sports company’s financials and its margins show why the House of Mouse prolly doesn’t want to get rid of it completely (❌)

• No big Warner Bros licensing deals with other streamers (❌)

• I picked Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to be the biggest box office movie over Barbie. Rookie mistake really. (❌)

• Really called my shot on this one, but Peloton did not get acquired by Nike. Instead, they actually signed a content deal with Lulu. Enemies to lovers arc (❌)

Finance

Some green on the screen?

• This was one of the bolder predictions, but I said Wells Fargo would be acquired OR if not completely bought out would sell significant parts of the company. Not only did it sell its private equity arm for a couple billion, but it greatly pulled back from the mortgage lending market, so I’m chalking this one up as a win. (✅)

• You can’t buy bonds directly on any of the popular brokerages still. Sigh (❌)

• Though I didn’t go into specifics, I did think this would be a big year for auditing transparency, and as a matter of fact, not only was the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board more active in enforcing audit standards, but the Corporate Transparency Act was also enacted and will go into effect to start the year (✅)

Crypto

The fact that I included this as its own section but not AI shows just how much things have changed in the last year lol

• I said Bitcoin and Ethereum would double this year. Check (Ethereum was actually only up ~91%, but Bitcoin was almost 150%, so I’m taking it) (✅)

• Unfortunately, I also predicted that while altcoins would not see the same price appreciation (wrong), but NFTs would also see a resurgence because there would be more use cases gaining traction. Also buzzer (❌)

• I thought this would be a year of increased enterprise and government Blockchain adoption, neither of which happened. Too busy with ~AI~ (❌)

• I predicted we’d see at least one country formalize a CBDC, and we saw 8. Further, we saw Argentina elect a Bitcoin maxi as President sooo (✅)

• An interesting hit, I thought Coinbase would take the top CEX spot from Binance. Not how I expected it to go down, but good for you Brian (✅)

Big Tech Shakeups

Some of these were easy to predict, but others not so much.

• Figured Lina Khan and the FTC would get crazy with the antitrust legislation, and they did not disappoint. Most recently, Adobe and Figma got caught in the regulatory crossfire(✅)

• One that I had felt pretty confident in, I thought Google would see its search market share decrease as ChatGPT took up some of the “how to bake pasta” searches. Not quite: Google still controls 91.53% of searches lol. Plus, no decentralized solutions made any traction (❌)

• I was super bullish on the smart home interoperability standard Matter, but despite some new tools being made compatible, uptake was slow. Sad (❌)

Labor

Never thought labor was going to be where I hit the nail on the head but alas

• Side hustles are at an ATH, with the estimated market size up to $455 billion (✅)

• I predicted that grad school applications would increase as the realities of the economy pushed more people to try to stand out, and we saw an estimated 4% growth in applicants (✅)

• Automation investments from service businesses increased from $17 billion to almost $20 B (✅)

• I predicted the momentum around 2022 unionization would continue to gain steam, and as evidenced by Hot Strike Summer, it most certainly did… though my prediction for some of this to spill over into Big Banks was a whiff (❓️)

• I predicted that no-code and low-code would have a year to tip the pendulum back to supporting both technical and nontechnical founders alike, and this was certainly the case as well, estimated to be up 20% (✅)

International

I thought geopolitical concerns were going to keep the market down… just skip this section tbh

• Predictions for good years for cyber were correct, but thinking we’d attempt to reach self-reliance in green energy and agtech were both wrong (❓️)

• I expected China to really step it up, and in certain industries, they have. Nobody had a better year in energy than China, though my bolder prediction for a bigger year for Chinese aerospace than for American space operations was dead wrong (❓️)

• I also predicted China to further invest in its own AI and semiconductor capabilities, both of which were on the $ (✅)

• Grim, but I also predicted that as the US continues to invest in domestic semiconductor production, we would see a fall in national support for Taiwan independence… Bingo (✅)

Industry of the Year

Cybersecurity and semiconductors were misses (❌)

Saying anything other than AI here was bound to be a loss, and unfortunately, I tried to buck the trend and say something original. Sometimes, the crowd is right.

Company of the Year (❌)

I picked Apple, and while they certainly had an eventful year, and I’m really not ashamed of this pick or some of the specific predictions I made around App Store anticompetitive challenges and the Vision Pro, Microsoft definitely took the W.

What a damn year they’ve had…

Reflection

I was slow to take up the torch for AI. It took me 3 months of legitimate use of ChatGPT to finally admit that AI isn’t some fad but really does have considerable improvements over search and content production. I literally can’t remember what life was like before using it.

I don’t expect for 2024 to bring a technology as transformative as AI, which I admit that I was 110% wrong about. It is a once in a generation type of achievement. Many of the misses I had were a direct result of this dismissal.

I’m also surprised by the sectors where I was the strongest versus where I floundered.

• Energy and labor were two of my stronger performing sets of predictions, but I’d also argue that they’re probably the two I know the least about.

• Consumer was a bloodbath, and while some of this was because I was a bit bolder with my predictions there, I would have thought that Crypto and Consumer would be the spaces where my expertise would have helped me perform comparatively better.

Going forward, I need to acknowledge the noise of the crowd while still leaning on my own observations. I leaned far too hard into going against the crowd on that one, though I think I’d rather swing and miss on bolder takes than regurgitate the same “AI is going to transform healthcare” buzzword-laden “thought leadership” posts from every VC and consultant with a LinkedIn and Medium account.

I feel pretty strong about some of my predictions that might not have played out in 2023 but still feel like they’re getting close to the tipping point. Consolidation in streaming, a rapid ascension in the cyber space, and more progress in nuclear all fall under this category.

There are also others where I can see were clear misses, such as the ESPN and Peloton M&A. I think that in both cases, I fell victim to the trap that is thinking too hard. Both companies have massive, devoted followings. Sometimes, great products with rabid fans are enough to make a business work.

I also think I should have done more to track progress throughout the year, especially to make future predictions. Need to identify trends as they happen throughout the year to make it easier to reflect EOY.

I actually do think I am going to get much better at this given how closely I have to follow the news for Infobot, but we shall see.

I am thinking about making another bold predictions newsletter next week… However, I want this year to be even more community-driven. Hit me with your boldest predictions, and I will feature my favorites (with credit).

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Cheers to another day,

Trey