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Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

156 points by eladgil 8y ago

jsherwani 8y ago
Fascinating read. I never thought of Devsumer as a category until now. It explains the recent spike in interest in this space: * Slack acquired Missions * Trello acquired Butler * GitHub launched Actions * Zapier’s success ($35m ARR) * The ridiculous numbers of Zapier clones out there
- lwb 8y ago
  Not to mention Apple's Shortcuts -- haven't used it but it seems to be in the same vein
strgrd 8y ago
"I am still quite bullish that a basked of cryptocurrencies will be worth in the trillions within the next 10 years. The primary short term driver for crypto value with be the generational replacement of gold as a store-of-value for a specific subset of the population. The longer term drivers of crypto value will be new forms of programable money and on-chain securities." What subset of the population is going to replace gold with crypto? Because it won't be the entire generation burned by ICO scams and bullish investment into whitepapers they don't understand.
- eladgil 8y ago
  Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).
  - zechs 8y ago
    Isn't that a big shift to expect given gold's track record as a store of value going back to almost the beginning of recorded history?
    - eladgil 8y ago
      It is a big shift and I could be wrong. However, horses are also something we used for transportation going back to the beginning of recorded history... (lots of other examples too). Crypto has a lot of aspects that make for a superior store of value (easy to move, seizure and censorship proof etc). Obviously, also has some drawbacks too like difficulty to custody...
      - kamarg 8y ago
        I feel like the recent 51% attack against Etherium shows that seizure and censorship proof isn't strictly true.
        wmf 8y ago
        Note that there was a 51% attack against ETC which is not Ethereum (ETH). ETC already had very little usage and was known to be insecure before the attack.
        tuesdayrain 8y ago
        Probably less than 0.001% of the population considers ETC to be the "real Ethereum"
        kamarg 8y ago
        That may be the case but don't pretty much all coins have this potential issue?
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.
    - gfodor 8y ago
      Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)
      - sf_rob 8y ago
        I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.
        nostrademons 8y ago
        So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment. I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you cannot do with anything else you can buy?" There are valid answers to that - gold is a catalyst in several chemical reactions that won't work with any other metal, it's corrosion resistant, it's shiny, it's a very good conductor that's quite malleable. But I'm with him in surmising that if people only used gold for its metallurgical properties, absent any historical sentimental attachment, the price would drop 99.9%. Gold is actually quite abundant; 190kt have been mined so far [1], most of which is either locked up in jewelry or being hoarded as an investment, so if people ceased to believe it was valuable there'd be a very large oversupply for the few real industrial uses. [1] https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-much-gold https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ThomPete 8y ago
  The coming generations who will need a store of value for digital assets which they value much more than older generations do. Those who grow up today who don't get burned by ICO scams but will get to know it as a natural thing, just like the internet was for the millinials.
- helen___keller 8y ago
  Also given the failures of crypto so far I don't see any evidence that a programmable money/securities revolution would come from crypto. I would bet that a conventional tech company (think a PayPal/Robinhood hybrid) could do it much better.
  - Red_Pill_Phil 8y ago
    The whole point of crypto is that its not centralized. Your argument has little merit.
    - helen___keller 8y ago
      Why must programmable securities/money be decentralized?
- csomar 8y ago
  10 years is enough for a newer generation to rise and make money. Those in the 15-25 right are quite adapt with Crypto. They'll be the next investors. Granted, if they are wise they won't put all of their liquid there. But if the 30-60 of the current world put a little in crypto; its' market value will fly out of the sky.
  - ivalm 8y ago
    But why would they put money into crypto? There is some reason to use crypto as a currency (anonymous transactions), but there is no particular reason to use it as a store of value (hard to comply with anti-money-laundering regulation, hard to protect from fraud, hard to pass through audit, etc)
    - wmf 8y ago
      Because there's a chance it will go up 10x and no other asset will.
      - UncleMeat 8y ago
        There's a chance that lottery tickets go up 1,000,000x. There's a chance that vintage NES controllers go up 100x. There is a chance that baseball cards go up 100x. Literally all things have a an arbitrary growth ceiling.
      - ivalm 8y ago
        Sorry if I didnt understand sarcasm, but in case you are serious, "speculation" is not the same as "store of value." Whether crypto is a good speculation target is a difficult question, but most do not sell crypto as a "speculation target" as its primary attribute. It is also unlikely that something whose primary attribute is speculation can have a positive roi long term.
        wmf 8y ago
        I'm not being sarcastic (this time). When crypto people say "store of value" I'm pretty sure they mean (long-term) speculation. Also consider that people may be investing for a different reason than what they say.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  There's been this pattern within crypto where each new bubble brings in new people, while the people burned in the last bubble leave in disgust and long-time hodlers from 2 bubbles ago cash out their winnings and do other things with their lives. Many of the most active developers and evangelists from 2011-2013 are doing other stuff now, and the ones that haven't are engaging in juvenile pissing matches with their millions (cf. Roger Ver and Craig Wright). Many of the folks burned by Mt. Gox left in disgust in 2014. Many of the current big exchanges (eg. CoinBase) were founded by people who got in after the 2011 bubble. Ethereum was founded by folks who got in after the 2013 bubble, and were initially skeptical of this whole cryptocurrency things. There's probably a wave of new cryptocurrency startups being founded in garages & dorm rooms right now by people who were too young to really participate in the 2013 or 2017 bubbles but don't want to miss out on the next one. The folks who got burned by ICOs are mostly already gone, or they're sitting around being bitter and predicting Bitcoin = $0. It's not all that different from the dot-com boom; I (mostly) missed out on the bubble from 1995-2000 since I was in high school at the time, but kept studying computers & web technologies in college and caught the mass adoption wave afterwards. I had a number of classmates and coworkers (at internships), slightly older than me, who rode the dot-com bubble right into the ground, losing both their jobs and their life savings. Many of them left tech altogether and became economists or traveled abroad or bounced around between temp work. They basically swore off investing in tech stocks, but one of the folks I'm thinking of thought she'd make a pretty penny by buying 3 houses and investing in hedge funds in 2007. It's human nature to believe that bad things that happened to other people aren't going to happen to you, and as a species we're remarkably bad at learning from other people's experience. The set of folks actually burned by ICOs is a relatively small subset of "all people" though - IIRC at the peak of the bubble there were only about 10M Bitcoin investors in the U.S. and only a small percentage of them actually invested in ICOs. That's like 3% of the population, still very much in early-adopter territory.
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    Web technologies created immense practical usage value right from the start. The fact that cryptocurrencies will do the same is very, very debatable. For now, the only valuable use case I know of is for illegal activities (ransomware, tax evasion, buying illegal stuff). Which is a sizeable market, but not one which is going to see mass adoption.
- southerndrift 8y ago
  Some days ago: We can confirm that there was a successful 51% attack on Ethereum Classic [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18849961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18849961 The value of crypto currencies is strongly linked to the available processing power that can be rented for a short amount of time. An attack must never be profitable. So the value of cryptocurrencies cannot grow arbitrarily. Just Bitcoin is quite secure because you cannot easily rent the specialized hardware.
- pxlpshr 8y ago
  I don't even know that many people who "store value in gold". The ones that do are usually also the people screaming that the sky is falling, at which point I favor guns, ammunition, and food & water.
aaavl2821 8y ago
Biopharma: neuroinflammation, next-gen genetically engineered microbe / cell / gene therapies, gene therapy and cell therapy for neuro and autoimmune disease, small molecules targeting genetically defined neuro, cardiovascular and autoimmune disease, chemogenetics, programming languages for specific parts of the bio stack $17B invested in bio startups in 2018, very little of it by traditional tech VCs One $11B exit < 5 years from series a (Juno), one $9B exit ~4 years from series a (avexis), one $8b mkt cap ipo, one $8b exit from ~5 year old company to start 2019 (loxo), multiple smaller billion+ exits, ~50 vc backed IPOs Several innovative companies launching their first drugs soon, potential to become standalone commercial companies: sage, agios, alnylam, Ionis / akcea, bluebird, ultragenyx, gw pharma
- eladgil 8y ago
  Good point in terms of mentioning biopharma. I stayed tech focused in this blog post but lots going on in bio.
_sword 8y ago
Much of this seems to be outdated, like someone at the end of 2016 looking towards 2017 trends. Devsumer makes sense still. Devops more generally is probably a better market to highlight especially as organizations try and tackle security concerns with cloud deployment models.
- eladgil 8y ago
  I agree there may be some hindsight bias. At the beginning of this blog post I call it out as well: "Sometimes this creates a very backwards looking view, as the most obvious signals are in companies that have been working well for a few years and the trend is really over." I do think DevOps is an exciting market with a lot going on. (I am an investor in GitLab, PagerDuty, and other related companies)...
fhood 8y ago
"5 core markets (Devsumer, Real Estate, AI hardware, Transportation and Logistics, Crypto) and 2 emerging ones (Legal, Defense)" Devsumer? For sure. Simplifying dev work seems like an area with pretty much eternal growth potential. But I find it hard to get excited about many of the others. Interacting with the government (defense) still seems to take buckets of money, and there are already large companies that do software in that space, even if their names don't come up much. It will be a while before people look a crypto as anything other than a sick joke I suspect. I kinda thought that the software+real-estate process had a whole lot of established players, but I could easily just be ignorant of some of the growth areas.
- alexgmcm 8y ago
  >I kinda thought that the software+real-estate process had a whole lot of established players, but I could easily just be ignorant of some of the growth areas. In my city in Spain letting agents still charge 10% of the annual rent as a fee when they do little more than print out a pre-written contract and hand you the keys. Apparently it is common in Italy too. This seems like an area ripe for disruption.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    That's how it works in NYC as well.
  - thatoneuser 8y ago
    In the US real estate agents do similar. You pay them many thousands of dollars to parade people through the home and pressure you to compromise on your listing price so they can close easier. In my experience, the agents usually can’t answer any basic questions about the home anyway. I’ve believed this industry has some tech coming it’s way for a while now. Would have loved to jumped on it early but it’s also one of those industries where you’d need an established “in” to make headway (i assume).
- mrfusion 8y ago
  There are actually four kinds of business; tourism, food service, railroads, and sales. (And hospitals/manufacturing and air travel) Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9qhk8ysJSwI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9qhk8ysJSwI
Beefin 8y ago
Ctrl + F "Healthcare" .. Hmm. Looks like your 2015 "top markets" post the top one was "Genomics", what happened? Did it sizzle? Is it no longer a top contender prospect?
- eladgil 8y ago
  For 2015 I listed out: "Gold markets" -Big data (with emphasis on things like Cloudera (~$3B co), Mesosphere) -SaaS with an emphasis on APIs and Dev Tools -Genomics And then a set of markets I thought would be smaller or binary. Full post here: http://blog.eladgil.com/2015/01/hot-markets-for-2015.html http://blog.eladgil.com/2015/01/hot-markets-for-2015.html For genomics in particular, Illumina is now a $40 billion company while Exact Sciences ($9B), Invitae ($1 billion), 23andMe (a few billion) and Ancestry (a few billion) are all in the market too.
beauzero 8y ago
...on the real estate side take a look at CoStar. Little known, commercial real estate company, 12B+ and has a monopoly. Very smart people and they don't get much turn over. They will make smart acquisitions.
- daheza 8y ago
  Used to work here, and yea they definitely know they are a monopoly. Acquiring apartments.com with all their commercial real estate data was really smart. Their tech department was too corporate for me though.
- gcb0 8y ago
  are you trying to liquidate your position? their stock skyrocket to over $400 for no aparent reason based on their revenue, and is on a free fall since august.
hackathonguy 8y ago
I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).
- ideashower 8y ago
  I'd love to hear more about the legal tech space in general.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Partner in a law firm told me they were starting to test various techs to search through legal documents. You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.
- ollerac 8y ago
  I think this has a lot to do with perceived value and complexity from the side of the developer. For me: I don't know the first thing about law and the perceived value of building something in that space is low compared with, for example, healthcare, where I feel like a lot of people can more easily see the benefits on real people. I think if you can clearly define the areas where either the perceived value (for the developer) is really high or the perceived complexity is relatively low, that's where you'll see the next developments in this space. I'd be curious to know where you think these areas are.
- xxpor 8y ago
  First job of legal tech: convince the Judicial Conference to make PACER free and not terrible.
  - kjhughes 8y ago
    Hopefully this pending legislation will pass: H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714
- 8y ago
dustingetz 8y ago
"taking a SQL database or excel spreadsheet and turning it into an app platform" A key insight here is that SQL is too complicated for this to ever work, and also the trend towards functional programming (React.js, Scala etc) – see http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ for what you get when you replace SQL with a simpler database! (We're seeking investment)
40acres 8y ago
The one trend I'm sensing is that difficult human/technology problems that were once thought of as 'solved' are now becoming hard again. Think of microprocessors as a model, for years Moore's law was running smoothly and you could set you watch on upgrading your PC at least once every 3 years. The rate of improvement is slowing down as it becomes more capital intensive to advance chips, all the while the demand for performant chips is increasing. We will need another transistor level breakthrough to fuel the next 25 years of microprocessor based improvement. You can see this trend also with energy on a longer timescale: oil and coal is the fuel that propelled the industrial revolution and human advancement for the past 150 years. Climate change demands that new forms of energy take the forefront: innovations in nuclear power and electricity transportation and storage are needed. If I were in an investor with a ton of cash I would look to past and explore innovations and ideas around the industrial revolution and try to apply those models to the next 50 years. I really do think we are approaching a similar point in human history where there will need to be a large set of fundamentally new discoveries to continue pushing us forward. As an aside, I think "devsumer" is also a great area. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I can't think of a labor force that is producing as much global value (in agreed upon terms) as software developers, creating tools for this labor force is going to continue to be big business.
- jp555 8y ago
  Technological progress has always been a series of overlapping S-curves. We all think it’s new when we notice the pattern, but it’s been going on forever. The pace of aviation tech progress in the early half of the 20th century had most believing everyone would be flying hypersonic by now, but then the tech flattened out as it approved its asymptote.
tehjoker 8y ago
Ah defense. It's just common sense that we should pour money into the military. We're just out to make money, there's definitely not an entire political viewpoint entangled in this "market opportunity". Those crazy radicals that are against killing pointlessly for imperial gains don't understand the real world. In the real world, we need the military to make the world safe for capital. WW1 was a smashing success, as were Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and all extremely clearly benefited the working class and made zero money for industrialists. If anything, these wars were entirely unselfish in nature. Wouldn't Saddam still have WND if not for the pride and strength of our armed services and the weapons manufacturers, energy industry, and other geopolitical factors? Fwiw, they're probably right. Maybe we will see more startups enter into this ripe "opportunity" to open the gates of hell and unleash the forces of greed and meyham.
- rndmize 8y ago
  Use of force is a separate problem from the development of weapons. I don't really have a problem with startups doing weapons development - someone is going to do it, and I have a hard time seeing how the world would be better if China or Russia took the lead on this.
  - tehjoker 8y ago
    I would point out that if the US is already spending more money on arms than the next several countries combined, I don't think this is the relevant issue. If another power was strong enough to threaten our defenses, that would be one thing but clearly there is something much bigger going on (I would say it is the US empire, at least according to a senior official in the Bush administration: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community). I hesitate to make this argument because I think they should be abolished, but if we have nukes, why do we need new "defensive" weapons? The only reason is to be able to control events in other parts of the world to the benefit of the people that start the wars. This perspective would imply that we should not be encouraging our citizens to devote their energies to devising ways to kill (i.e. form startups around "defense").
lordnacho 8y ago
I'm not sure about that "Devsumer" section. IFTTT / Zapier and those are not replacing Accenture as far as I can tell. The thing that makes Accenture a viable business is they can sell large projects to large entities. Things that people generally do not reckon they can fix on their own, like government health websites. There's no way to knit that together with just some common APIs. Yes, ironically Accenture can't either, but the point is they make money on convincing people they can. The thing about people getting more dev-savvy I don't buy either. Yes, people can glue a few bits together now, but most people still suck at anything beyond simple automation. If you want evidence of this, look at Excel based jobs. Pretty much all of them can be automated in Excel itself, and every time someone tries it, they create an awful mess. So yeah we'll now have a world of little Rube Goldberg machines of everyone's making, but I don't see them replacing any kind of large scale project. They can't really do it technically, and they don't seem like they will replace the incumbent salespeople either.
- robla 8y ago
  It seems to me that tools for creating large scale projects is a big opportunity. Not everyone who creates a "little Rube Goldberg machine" is a hopeless idiot who is pleased with their creation. Some of them will aspire to create bigger, better machines, and will prefer to spend their time trying to build them instead of setting up a meeting with an incumbent salesperson.
banachtarski 8y ago
Agreed on some of it. Crypto though is the glaring aspect I disagree with completely (cue people likening it to the internet and the dot com boom instead of tulips with a serial number).
gcb0 8y ago
lol. every generation will redo "forms as software". airtable is a $1bi bet that people will finally be pleased with Clipper'86 auto-form desiger (or whatever that thing was called). Hint: nope.
rhacker 8y ago
AI + Defense technology companies will EXPLODE in the coming years. In the next 10 years I'm sure we'll be seeing police and military application of un-man-controlled, (like toy style) drones that simply, find out who is around where and what time. These things don't really even need any actionable targets, just general surveillance. They will get around the law by stating they are just capturing metadata - name, location, time, etc.. Drone tech will improve drastically too, bolstering the consumer space with standardized batteries and self-battery replacement towers. Not saying this is a good thing, but saying it will happen.
rs86 8y ago
This is ridiculously full of unfounded statements, naivety and unsound reasoning
jacknews 8y ago
IMHO, Missing from the list is software defined networking and telco "digital transformation" in general. ISPs etc are gradually moving to an automated self-serve world.

156 points by eladgil 8y ago

Fascinating read. I never thought of Devsumer as a category until now. It explains the recent spike in interest in this space: * Slack acquired Missions * Trello acquired Butler * GitHub launched Actions * Zapier’s success ($35m ARR) * The ridiculous numbers of Zapier clones out there

lwb 8y ago
Not to mention Apple's Shortcuts -- haven't used it but it seems to be in the same vein

strgrd 8y ago

"I am still quite bullish that a basked of cryptocurrencies will be worth in the trillions within the next 10 years. The primary short term driver for crypto value with be the generational replacement of gold as a store-of-value for a specific subset of the population. The longer term drivers of crypto value will be new forms of programable money and on-chain securities." What subset of the population is going to replace gold with crypto? Because it won't be the entire generation burned by ICO scams and bullish investment into whitepapers they don't understand.

eladgil 8y ago
Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).
- zechs 8y ago
  Isn't that a big shift to expect given gold's track record as a store of value going back to almost the beginning of recorded history?
  - eladgil 8y ago
    It is a big shift and I could be wrong. However, horses are also something we used for transportation going back to the beginning of recorded history... (lots of other examples too). Crypto has a lot of aspects that make for a superior store of value (easy to move, seizure and censorship proof etc). Obviously, also has some drawbacks too like difficulty to custody...
    - kamarg 8y ago
      I feel like the recent 51% attack against Etherium shows that seizure and censorship proof isn't strictly true.
      - wmf 8y ago
        Note that there was a 51% attack against ETC which is not Ethereum (ETH). ETC already had very little usage and was known to be insecure before the attack.
      - tuesdayrain 8y ago
        Probably less than 0.001% of the population considers ETC to be the "real Ethereum"
        kamarg 8y ago
        That may be the case but don't pretty much all coins have this potential issue?
- mattnewton 8y ago
  I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.
  - gfodor 8y ago
    Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)
    - sf_rob 8y ago
      I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment. I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you cannot do with anything else you can buy?" There are valid answers to that - gold is a catalyst in several chemical reactions that won't work with any other metal, it's corrosion resistant, it's shiny, it's a very good conductor that's quite malleable. But I'm with him in surmising that if people only used gold for its metallurgical properties, absent any historical sentimental attachment, the price would drop 99.9%. Gold is actually quite abundant; 190kt have been mined so far [1], most of which is either locked up in jewelry or being hoarded as an investment, so if people ceased to believe it was valuable there'd be a very large oversupply for the few real industrial uses. [1] https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-much-gold https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...
deleted 8y ago
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ThomPete 8y ago
The coming generations who will need a store of value for digital assets which they value much more than older generations do. Those who grow up today who don't get burned by ICO scams but will get to know it as a natural thing, just like the internet was for the millinials.
helen___keller 8y ago
Also given the failures of crypto so far I don't see any evidence that a programmable money/securities revolution would come from crypto. I would bet that a conventional tech company (think a PayPal/Robinhood hybrid) could do it much better.
- Red_Pill_Phil 8y ago
  The whole point of crypto is that its not centralized. Your argument has little merit.
  - helen___keller 8y ago
    Why must programmable securities/money be decentralized?
csomar 8y ago
10 years is enough for a newer generation to rise and make money. Those in the 15-25 right are quite adapt with Crypto. They'll be the next investors. Granted, if they are wise they won't put all of their liquid there. But if the 30-60 of the current world put a little in crypto; its' market value will fly out of the sky.
- ivalm 8y ago
  But why would they put money into crypto? There is some reason to use crypto as a currency (anonymous transactions), but there is no particular reason to use it as a store of value (hard to comply with anti-money-laundering regulation, hard to protect from fraud, hard to pass through audit, etc)
  - wmf 8y ago
    Because there's a chance it will go up 10x and no other asset will.
    - UncleMeat 8y ago
      There's a chance that lottery tickets go up 1,000,000x. There's a chance that vintage NES controllers go up 100x. There is a chance that baseball cards go up 100x. Literally all things have a an arbitrary growth ceiling.
    - ivalm 8y ago
      Sorry if I didnt understand sarcasm, but in case you are serious, "speculation" is not the same as "store of value." Whether crypto is a good speculation target is a difficult question, but most do not sell crypto as a "speculation target" as its primary attribute. It is also unlikely that something whose primary attribute is speculation can have a positive roi long term.
      - wmf 8y ago
        I'm not being sarcastic (this time). When crypto people say "store of value" I'm pretty sure they mean (long-term) speculation. Also consider that people may be investing for a different reason than what they say.
nostrademons 8y ago
There's been this pattern within crypto where each new bubble brings in new people, while the people burned in the last bubble leave in disgust and long-time hodlers from 2 bubbles ago cash out their winnings and do other things with their lives. Many of the most active developers and evangelists from 2011-2013 are doing other stuff now, and the ones that haven't are engaging in juvenile pissing matches with their millions (cf. Roger Ver and Craig Wright). Many of the folks burned by Mt. Gox left in disgust in 2014. Many of the current big exchanges (eg. CoinBase) were founded by people who got in after the 2011 bubble. Ethereum was founded by folks who got in after the 2013 bubble, and were initially skeptical of this whole cryptocurrency things. There's probably a wave of new cryptocurrency startups being founded in garages & dorm rooms right now by people who were too young to really participate in the 2013 or 2017 bubbles but don't want to miss out on the next one. The folks who got burned by ICOs are mostly already gone, or they're sitting around being bitter and predicting Bitcoin = $0. It's not all that different from the dot-com boom; I (mostly) missed out on the bubble from 1995-2000 since I was in high school at the time, but kept studying computers & web technologies in college and caught the mass adoption wave afterwards. I had a number of classmates and coworkers (at internships), slightly older than me, who rode the dot-com bubble right into the ground, losing both their jobs and their life savings. Many of them left tech altogether and became economists or traveled abroad or bounced around between temp work. They basically swore off investing in tech stocks, but one of the folks I'm thinking of thought she'd make a pretty penny by buying 3 houses and investing in hedge funds in 2007. It's human nature to believe that bad things that happened to other people aren't going to happen to you, and as a species we're remarkably bad at learning from other people's experience. The set of folks actually burned by ICOs is a relatively small subset of "all people" though - IIRC at the peak of the bubble there were only about 10M Bitcoin investors in the U.S. and only a small percentage of them actually invested in ICOs. That's like 3% of the population, still very much in early-adopter territory.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  Web technologies created immense practical usage value right from the start. The fact that cryptocurrencies will do the same is very, very debatable. For now, the only valuable use case I know of is for illegal activities (ransomware, tax evasion, buying illegal stuff). Which is a sizeable market, but not one which is going to see mass adoption.
southerndrift 8y ago
Some days ago: We can confirm that there was a successful 51% attack on Ethereum Classic [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18849961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18849961 The value of crypto currencies is strongly linked to the available processing power that can be rented for a short amount of time. An attack must never be profitable. So the value of cryptocurrencies cannot grow arbitrarily. Just Bitcoin is quite secure because you cannot easily rent the specialized hardware.
pxlpshr 8y ago
I don't even know that many people who "store value in gold". The ones that do are usually also the people screaming that the sky is falling, at which point I favor guns, ammunition, and food & water.

aaavl2821 8y ago

Biopharma: neuroinflammation, next-gen genetically engineered microbe / cell / gene therapies, gene therapy and cell therapy for neuro and autoimmune disease, small molecules targeting genetically defined neuro, cardiovascular and autoimmune disease, chemogenetics, programming languages for specific parts of the bio stack $17B invested in bio startups in 2018, very little of it by traditional tech VCs One $11B exit < 5 years from series a (Juno), one $9B exit ~4 years from series a (avexis), one $8b mkt cap ipo, one $8b exit from ~5 year old company to start 2019 (loxo), multiple smaller billion+ exits, ~50 vc backed IPOs Several innovative companies launching their first drugs soon, potential to become standalone commercial companies: sage, agios, alnylam, Ionis / akcea, bluebird, ultragenyx, gw pharma

eladgil 8y ago
Good point in terms of mentioning biopharma. I stayed tech focused in this blog post but lots going on in bio.

_sword 8y ago

Much of this seems to be outdated, like someone at the end of 2016 looking towards 2017 trends. Devsumer makes sense still. Devops more generally is probably a better market to highlight especially as organizations try and tackle security concerns with cloud deployment models.

eladgil 8y ago
I agree there may be some hindsight bias. At the beginning of this blog post I call it out as well: "Sometimes this creates a very backwards looking view, as the most obvious signals are in companies that have been working well for a few years and the trend is really over." I do think DevOps is an exciting market with a lot going on. (I am an investor in GitLab, PagerDuty, and other related companies)...

fhood 8y ago

"5 core markets (Devsumer, Real Estate, AI hardware, Transportation and Logistics, Crypto) and 2 emerging ones (Legal, Defense)" Devsumer? For sure. Simplifying dev work seems like an area with pretty much eternal growth potential. But I find it hard to get excited about many of the others. Interacting with the government (defense) still seems to take buckets of money, and there are already large companies that do software in that space, even if their names don't come up much. It will be a while before people look a crypto as anything other than a sick joke I suspect. I kinda thought that the software+real-estate process had a whole lot of established players, but I could easily just be ignorant of some of the growth areas.

alexgmcm 8y ago
>I kinda thought that the software+real-estate process had a whole lot of established players, but I could easily just be ignorant of some of the growth areas. In my city in Spain letting agents still charge 10% of the annual rent as a fee when they do little more than print out a pre-written contract and hand you the keys. Apparently it is common in Italy too. This seems like an area ripe for disruption.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  That's how it works in NYC as well.
- thatoneuser 8y ago
  In the US real estate agents do similar. You pay them many thousands of dollars to parade people through the home and pressure you to compromise on your listing price so they can close easier. In my experience, the agents usually can’t answer any basic questions about the home anyway. I’ve believed this industry has some tech coming it’s way for a while now. Would have loved to jumped on it early but it’s also one of those industries where you’d need an established “in” to make headway (i assume).
mrfusion 8y ago
There are actually four kinds of business; tourism, food service, railroads, and sales. (And hospitals/manufacturing and air travel) Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9qhk8ysJSwI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9qhk8ysJSwI

Beefin 8y ago

Ctrl + F "Healthcare" .. Hmm. Looks like your 2015 "top markets" post the top one was "Genomics", what happened? Did it sizzle? Is it no longer a top contender prospect?

eladgil 8y ago
For 2015 I listed out: "Gold markets" -Big data (with emphasis on things like Cloudera (~$3B co), Mesosphere) -SaaS with an emphasis on APIs and Dev Tools -Genomics And then a set of markets I thought would be smaller or binary. Full post here: http://blog.eladgil.com/2015/01/hot-markets-for-2015.html http://blog.eladgil.com/2015/01/hot-markets-for-2015.html For genomics in particular, Illumina is now a $40 billion company while Exact Sciences ($9B), Invitae ($1 billion), 23andMe (a few billion) and Ancestry (a few billion) are all in the market too.

beauzero 8y ago

...on the real estate side take a look at CoStar. Little known, commercial real estate company, 12B+ and has a monopoly. Very smart people and they don't get much turn over. They will make smart acquisitions.

daheza 8y ago
Used to work here, and yea they definitely know they are a monopoly. Acquiring apartments.com with all their commercial real estate data was really smart. Their tech department was too corporate for me though.
gcb0 8y ago
are you trying to liquidate your position? their stock skyrocket to over $400 for no aparent reason based on their revenue, and is on a free fall since august.

hackathonguy 8y ago

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

ideashower 8y ago
I'd love to hear more about the legal tech space in general.
lordnacho 8y ago
Partner in a law firm told me they were starting to test various techs to search through legal documents. You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.
ollerac 8y ago
I think this has a lot to do with perceived value and complexity from the side of the developer. For me: I don't know the first thing about law and the perceived value of building something in that space is low compared with, for example, healthcare, where I feel like a lot of people can more easily see the benefits on real people. I think if you can clearly define the areas where either the perceived value (for the developer) is really high or the perceived complexity is relatively low, that's where you'll see the next developments in this space. I'd be curious to know where you think these areas are.
xxpor 8y ago
First job of legal tech: convince the Judicial Conference to make PACER free and not terrible.
- kjhughes 8y ago
  Hopefully this pending legislation will pass: H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714
8y ago

dustingetz 8y ago

"taking a SQL database or excel spreadsheet and turning it into an app platform" A key insight here is that SQL is too complicated for this to ever work, and also the trend towards functional programming (React.js, Scala etc) – see http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ for what you get when you replace SQL with a simpler database! (We're seeking investment)

40acres 8y ago

The one trend I'm sensing is that difficult human/technology problems that were once thought of as 'solved' are now becoming hard again. Think of microprocessors as a model, for years Moore's law was running smoothly and you could set you watch on upgrading your PC at least once every 3 years. The rate of improvement is slowing down as it becomes more capital intensive to advance chips, all the while the demand for performant chips is increasing. We will need another transistor level breakthrough to fuel the next 25 years of microprocessor based improvement. You can see this trend also with energy on a longer timescale: oil and coal is the fuel that propelled the industrial revolution and human advancement for the past 150 years. Climate change demands that new forms of energy take the forefront: innovations in nuclear power and electricity transportation and storage are needed. If I were in an investor with a ton of cash I would look to past and explore innovations and ideas around the industrial revolution and try to apply those models to the next 50 years. I really do think we are approaching a similar point in human history where there will need to be a large set of fundamentally new discoveries to continue pushing us forward. As an aside, I think "devsumer" is also a great area. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I can't think of a labor force that is producing as much global value (in agreed upon terms) as software developers, creating tools for this labor force is going to continue to be big business.

jp555 8y ago
Technological progress has always been a series of overlapping S-curves. We all think it’s new when we notice the pattern, but it’s been going on forever. The pace of aviation tech progress in the early half of the 20th century had most believing everyone would be flying hypersonic by now, but then the tech flattened out as it approved its asymptote.

tehjoker 8y ago

Ah defense. It's just common sense that we should pour money into the military. We're just out to make money, there's definitely not an entire political viewpoint entangled in this "market opportunity". Those crazy radicals that are against killing pointlessly for imperial gains don't understand the real world. In the real world, we need the military to make the world safe for capital. WW1 was a smashing success, as were Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and all extremely clearly benefited the working class and made zero money for industrialists. If anything, these wars were entirely unselfish in nature. Wouldn't Saddam still have WND if not for the pride and strength of our armed services and the weapons manufacturers, energy industry, and other geopolitical factors? Fwiw, they're probably right. Maybe we will see more startups enter into this ripe "opportunity" to open the gates of hell and unleash the forces of greed and meyham.

rndmize 8y ago
Use of force is a separate problem from the development of weapons. I don't really have a problem with startups doing weapons development - someone is going to do it, and I have a hard time seeing how the world would be better if China or Russia took the lead on this.
- tehjoker 8y ago
  I would point out that if the US is already spending more money on arms than the next several countries combined, I don't think this is the relevant issue. If another power was strong enough to threaten our defenses, that would be one thing but clearly there is something much bigger going on (I would say it is the US empire, at least according to a senior official in the Bush administration: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community). I hesitate to make this argument because I think they should be abolished, but if we have nukes, why do we need new "defensive" weapons? The only reason is to be able to control events in other parts of the world to the benefit of the people that start the wars. This perspective would imply that we should not be encouraging our citizens to devote their energies to devising ways to kill (i.e. form startups around "defense").

lordnacho 8y ago

I'm not sure about that "Devsumer" section. IFTTT / Zapier and those are not replacing Accenture as far as I can tell. The thing that makes Accenture a viable business is they can sell large projects to large entities. Things that people generally do not reckon they can fix on their own, like government health websites. There's no way to knit that together with just some common APIs. Yes, ironically Accenture can't either, but the point is they make money on convincing people they can. The thing about people getting more dev-savvy I don't buy either. Yes, people can glue a few bits together now, but most people still suck at anything beyond simple automation. If you want evidence of this, look at Excel based jobs. Pretty much all of them can be automated in Excel itself, and every time someone tries it, they create an awful mess. So yeah we'll now have a world of little Rube Goldberg machines of everyone's making, but I don't see them replacing any kind of large scale project. They can't really do it technically, and they don't seem like they will replace the incumbent salespeople either.

robla 8y ago
It seems to me that tools for creating large scale projects is a big opportunity. Not everyone who creates a "little Rube Goldberg machine" is a hopeless idiot who is pleased with their creation. Some of them will aspire to create bigger, better machines, and will prefer to spend their time trying to build them instead of setting up a meeting with an incumbent salesperson.

banachtarski 8y ago

Agreed on some of it. Crypto though is the glaring aspect I disagree with completely (cue people likening it to the internet and the dot com boom instead of tulips with a serial number).

gcb0 8y ago

lol. every generation will redo "forms as software". airtable is a $1bi bet that people will finally be pleased with Clipper'86 auto-form desiger (or whatever that thing was called). Hint: nope.

rhacker 8y ago

AI + Defense technology companies will EXPLODE in the coming years. In the next 10 years I'm sure we'll be seeing police and military application of un-man-controlled, (like toy style) drones that simply, find out who is around where and what time. These things don't really even need any actionable targets, just general surveillance. They will get around the law by stating they are just capturing metadata - name, location, time, etc.. Drone tech will improve drastically too, bolstering the consumer space with standardized batteries and self-battery replacement towers. Not saying this is a good thing, but saying it will happen.

rs86 8y ago

This is ridiculously full of unfounded statements, naivety and unsound reasoning

jacknews 8y ago

IMHO, Missing from the list is software defined networking and telco "digital transformation" in general. ISPs etc are gradually moving to an automated self-serve world.