Market
- VC’s accelerate investments in “internet of things” except sometime in Q4, wake up and realize it’s no different than “consumer electronics” – and that we still need to innovate around the manufacturing infrastructure, distribution economics, and consumer liability of the consumer goods business to really make this a venture fundable category.
- VC’s start investing in technology-enabled “offline” businesses (distribution, services etc) – most of whom would never have gotten venture money 3 years ago.
- Native advertising goes “RTB” and thus becomes an oxymoron (hold on, its already an oxymoron)
- Apple finally decides to spend its cash hoard on buying internet companies instead of just on building cool campuses (RIP Cupertino Village and Fantasia? ).
- Yahoo stock drops back to where it was BM (before Marissa) because no matter how much prettier and usable the site is, still no one clicks on banner ads.
- Google finally fixes the problem with mobile (discovery, search, distribution, tracking, monetization, a/b testing) and races ahead while Apple waxes nostalgically for 2010.
Venture
- 50% of accelerators go out of business because most of their companies go out of business.
- Top tier VC quietly creeps back into consumer internet (social, e-commerce) but continue to give lip service to enterprise software as to keep the rest of the venture capitalist herd guessing.
- Huge funding gap appears for seed stage companies as seed stage VC firms look for series A traction and accelerators look for seed stage traction. For better for worse, only entrepreneurs ready to bootstrap their companies for 12-24 month are able to start new ventures. But . . .
- Handful of top tier VC’s firm and brave seed stage firms creep back into true seed stage investing because you cannot build a legacy (or generate outsized returns) by competing with hedge funds for Twitter series F stock. While . . .
- The bottom 50% of “early stage” venture capital firms realize how crappy their portfolio of “early stage” investments are and decides to save their fund by investing in cross over deals (read Uber/Palantir). Because . . .
- IPO markets goes gangbusters for the first 6 month until a huge slow down in the second half . . . which causes a lot of VC’s to default on their leases to their brand new Maserati(s).
