(2024-01-01) Wilson What Will Happen In 2024

Fred Wilson: What Will Happen In 2024. It seems that a “soft landing” is likely. That is good news for the innovation economy because healthy capital markets are a necessary support system. However, optimistic capital markets are necessary but not sufficient for a healthy innovation economy. We also need innovation.... The good news is we have a lot of that and more is coming in 2024. I have never seen an environment with more innovation in the forty years I have been in the tech sector.

Let’s start with Artificial intelligence (AI) (LLM) which was the big event in 2023.

we are moving into the application era of AI, much like the browser brought us the application era of the web and the iPhone brought us the application era of the mobile device. This is a big deal. (bandwagon)

I believe it will take years of litigation and regulation before we understand what the appropriate business model and norms are for the AI economy. But fortunately, like web3 and the Internet before it, the tech sector will not wait for those issues to be resolved

That’s a good segue to web3...2024 will be the year that regulators and lawmakers come to terms with web3.

But as important as regulatory clarity is to web3, it pales in importance with the need for a “ChatGPT moment” for blockchain-based technologies

I think we will see mainstream decentralized applications emerge in 2024 as we now have inexpensive and fast transactions and simpler user interfaces. Vitalik Buterin wrote a nice piece about this a few days ago.

AI and Web3 are two sides of the same coin. AI will help make web3 usable for mainstream applications and web3 will help us trust AI.

But none of that will matter if we don’t accelerate our focus on our warming planet. (climate change)

The energy transition is being powered by innovation in energy generation (renewables, nuclear, etc), energy storage (batteries, storage networks, etc), and smarter energy distribution. In the process of rebuilding the infrastructure and systems by which we power this planet, we are also modernizing the energy stack and making it decentralized, modular, and programmable. (2023-12-13-MakingEnergyProgrammable)

I believe that 2024 will be a coming out party for the new energy stack and I am excited to be investing in this area and helping to make it happen.

So if we have healthier capital markets and more innovation than ever, what is up with the venture capital ecosystem? Well, that’s not such a happy story... I do not expect that venture capital investing and venture capital fund formation to grow that much year over year in 2024.