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.

Every year I put together a playlist at the end of the year with some of the new music I found and got into.

Many of these songs are under the radar which is my favorite kind of music.

So I hope you find something new that you like in here.

I have always been a big fan of breakfast, lunch and dinner business meetings. There is something about breaking bread over a meeting, or a glass of wine or beer or a cup of coffee. The ideal location is a place where others are doing the same thing so you can bump into friends, colleagues, and others regularly.

For years, I would do my breakfast meetings at The Coffee Shop (now closed) in Union Square and my lunch meetings at Taralucci or Punch (now closed). I moved my regular breakfast spot to Maialino (now closed) in or around 2010 and most mornings I would grab one of the front tables there and see so many friends in the NYC startup sector coming and going.

When we moved USV to the south side of Union Square in 2022, I started looking around for a place near our new office to do my breakfast and lunch meetings. I could not find anything that felt right.

I noticed a beautiful space with dramatic high ceilings in the ground floor USV's new office building at 817 Broadway and I asked our landlord about it. He told me that "we want something special in that space." So I called my friends Nick Anderer and Natalie Johnson who own and operate Anton's, our favorite restaurant in the West Village, and said "you should take this space and make a restaurant there."

The good news is they did exactly that. And last week they opened Leon's, an all-day fine dining restaurant that features Italian cuisine with French and Egyptian accents.

I have now had the pleasure of three dinners, three breakfasts, and one lunch at Leon's in the last week and I have loved everything. They have a barista making coffees and a baker making pastries in the mornings to compliment a fantastic hot breakfast menu. The salads and sandwiches at lunch are perfect. And the dinner features an amazing array of appetizers to start and fantastic pasta and main courses. And the gelato and tahini cookies are just too good not to order to finish the meal.

I plan to use Leon's the way I used Mailino and before that The Coffee Shop and Taralucci. I hope the NYC startup sector in the Union Square area does the same and we can recreate the vibe we had going at those spots before the pandemic came along and messed things up.

Leon's is open every day of the week from 8am to 11pm. However, they will be closed on Mondays until December 16th so they can tweak a few things without impacting customers.

I hope to bump into you all at Leon's in the coming months and years. You can book a reservation here.