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.
