🔮 2024 Predictions
A few predictions as we look ahead to 2024
First of all, we made it! The final memo of the year. 52 memos. Every Thursday morning all year. For those who read even a small percentage of our writing, we thank you. For those just getting here, welcome and thanks for joining.Â
This time of year is often a time of reflection and careful preparation for what is next. Personally, we write goals, reflect on our previous years’ aspirations and make plans to grow and improve. We thought it only fitting to throw a few of our macro predictions in here as well.
George’s predictions for 2024
Disclaimer: these are largely softballs. I am not that creative when it comes to predicting the future…go figure.
2024 is the year of fintech. You can already see the public market rebound in companies like Affirm (+439%) and Upstart (+242%)...let us never forget this guy. With a looming Stripe IPO, I expect a large tailwind for fintech as a category, complete with multiple IPOs, massive growth rounds and a lot of early stage activity.
VC contraction is just beginning. Investors will continue to realize that venture capital is a suboptimal asset class. Most underperform the S&P and your money is illiquid for a long time. Funds will have to continue to shrink, promoting fewer partners as they raise smaller funds. My caveat here is that I believe seed and pre-seed will remain an attractive asset class for risk on investors.
I wanted to try to take a flier here and predict some absurd acquisition but nothing was coming together so…the groundhog will see his shadow.
Paul’s predictions for 2024
Design-to-code AI tools gain mainstream adoption. As code generation by large language models continues to improve, there several startups are building tools that convert designs into code. Trace and v0 generate application UIs from written prompts. tldraw does the same, but with sketches as the starting point. I’m excited to see how startups such as Pax fit into this new paradigm and meet the growing demand for AI-first UI engines.Â
Early stage venture has its best year of the decade. Building on top of George’s prediction, I see early stage venture investments outperforming in 2024. Venture has built a strong motion in the past few years, scaling up and down to invest across two previous hype cycles (the passion economy and crypto). This time is different, and I expect to see some major wins from the 2024 vintage.Â
49ers win the superbowl! A guy can dream right?
We look forward to grading ourselves later next year. Until then, expect to see us back here with our first memo of 2024 at the end of January. We hope you all had a fantastic holiday season and we wish you a happy, healthy start to the new year.Â
At least for large LPs, venture remains an attractive asset class because they do have access to the top quantile funds which can deliver a 50x return in exchange for locking up a few percent of their AUM for 10-15 years.
I'd say a safer bet is there's downward pressure on fees leading to smaller firms, especially for new managers.
Fully agree on early-stage venture. I think we’re going to see larger and more frequent seed/series A investments due to the high risk-reward, but it’s going to be the capital-efficient ones that really survive, since the growth stage investments are going to be few and far between, and likely focused on the aforementioned capital-efficient companies that are less risky investments