A lot of people reacted to my New Years Day predictions post with skepticism. And rightly so. Some of the "predictions" were pretty far out.

But that was the point. I probably should have called them provocations not predictions.

That post was a list of things that I feel should happen, not so much what will happen.

Our business is about teaming up with founders who have a shared vision of where things are going and a desire to make them happen.

So my provocations are a good way of letting the world know where our head is at. Founders whose heads are in a similar place will appreciate that and come knocking on our door.

Or so we hope.

I've done a lot of these January 1st look forward posts in the 20+ years I've been blogging. I've used many different approaches. I sometimes talk big themes, like I did last year. I sometimes focus on just one thing. And sometimes I just make a bunch of predictions. I am going to do the latter approach today because I feel like it and it's so much fun.

1/ Apple and Google will leverage their existing market power to surpass OpenAI/ChatGPT in consumer AI prompts by the end of 2025.

2/ Waymo will surpass Uber in rides taken in San Franciso and Los Angeles by the end of 2025.

3/ Direct bank to bank payments will surpass credit card interchange payments in a few categories in the US in 2025.

4/ A decentralized clinical trial attracts millions of participants and produces a favorable outcome and Trump's FDA not only approves the drug but celebrates the approach.

5/ A housekeeper robot named Judy is launched by Dyson and it becomes a massive success, selling millions of units.

6/ NFT Art, left for dead at the end of 2024, makes a remarkable comeback and the MOMA purchases The 6529 Museum Of Art for an undisclosed sum.

7/ An AI doctor with the personality of Mr Rogers will treat millions of patients at zero cost in 2025.

8/ A bitcoin mining operation will pair with a wind farm in Newfoundland and grid scale battery storage to power an AI data center showcasing a new model for sustainable infrastructure.

9/ Arizona's ESA program attracts over 25% of K12 students in the state, leading to a number of local school closures.

10/ An AI produces an animated feature film that is nominated for an Oscar.

11/ An air taxi service launches in New York City offering an alternative to the L train commute.

12/ TikTok turns all videos into memecoins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges all over the world.

13/ The USV Librarian goes rogue, gets access to USV's crypto wallet, and starts making seed investments, one of which turns into a fund returner.

Like I said yesterday, "buckle up", 2025 is going to be wild.

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending (What Happened) and one looking forward to the year ahead (What Will Happen). This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow.

Some years are marked by one big thing that overshadows everything else. In tech, startups, and VC, 2024 was one of those years. The one big thing was Silicon Valley's hostile takeover of the federal government, via an infiltration of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, and Trump's subsequent thrashing of Joe Biden's "establishment" government in the November election.

The backdrop for this takeover is the rapid advancement of technologies over the last decade that will reshape our society and the establishment government's hostility toward and fear of them. Silicon Valley tried for much of the last decade to educate, communicate, and help the establishment "get there" on the innovation economy and ultimately was shut out and shut down. It was frustrating. Very frustrating. That frustration resulted in a full-on endorsement of the "blow it all up" mentality behind the MAGA movement.

Trump/MAGA and Silicon Valley make for strange bedfellows, but they are now very much in bed together and their partnership may bring massive changes to the US and the world. Innovation exists all over the world, but the center of gravity in the innovation economy remains in the US and it is centered in Silicon Valley. What happens in the US over the next four years will shape the innovation economy all over the world.

As I listed in my What Will Happen In 2024 post from last year, there are a host of technological innovations that are crashing on our shores all at the same time. I said in that post "I have never seen an environment with more innovation in the forty years I have been in the tech sector. It is breathtaking to see."

These innovations include artificial intelligence, decentralized computing, synthetic biology, clean and renewable energy, and more. And these sectors are coming together quickly. Artificial intelligence moves synthetic biology forward. Clean and renewable energy powers AI data centers. Decentralized computing allows AI agents to connect over permissionless pathways. And so on and so forth.

And now we have a government in DC that wants to let all of this stuff happen. They want the innovation and chaos that all of this tech will unleash on society. And so it is going to happen.

That's a big deal. Buckle up.

I will talk more tomorrow about what we might see in 2025 as this unfettered wave of innovation crashes onto our shores.