What Happened in 2024 … Buckle Up for 2025 and Buyer Beware
Good morning everyone and happy New Year’s eve.
I have been very lucky this year with health and our family and friends so it is easy for me to look back and look ahead without much personal drama and grief.
I appreciate that will rarely be the case and I am glad as I look back that I took advantage of It spending lot’s of time with Rachel and Max despite them living in different cities across the country, watching Ellen grow her real estate business and charitable work, my friends on the bike and little bit on the golf course. I love my two full time jobs at Social Leverage and Stocktwits so work never feels like work to me and the meds keep my anxiety in check 🙂 . The biggest change in my schedule this year was much less time outside, on the road, on my bike and more time lifting weights in the gym. I do not plan on changing that. Those extra hours went to making all the rest work.
I have written a few posts already about ‘predictions’ and the year in review’, here and here but I wanted to summarize it all as best I can now that more of the people I read have shared their own thoughts.
In Coronado, where I sit now writing this, very little has changed… which is the joy of Coronado. I think the reason I like it more and more every time I cross the bridge is because of the chaos at every corner in even my simple and lucky daily life. Of course, we have all the same benefits of modern technology as the rest of the world but they sit in the background to the quiet and the calm and the beauty of the island. Because money never sleeps and is endlessly printed, money is the one thing that is now changing Coronado the most. Blackstone now owns the Hotel Del and instead of ripping costs out and raising prices, they invested money (of course to raise prices) and got concessions from the city to build condos/timeshares and make part of the beach their own (as a resident I am ok with this). Now hotel rooms will be $3,000 a night in the summer and I can walk for Nobu sushi and a great steak anytime I want. That is the type of luxury I never expected to come to the island when we moved here in 2009. I remember moving here with the family and ditching the car for Uber in 2011 or 2012 and waiting 40 minutes for an Uber Town Car (they clustered up in La Jolla and Del Mar). Uber X did not yet exist. It was Coronado and The Del Hotel more specifically that helped blow up Uber internationally as people from around the world that visited the island and hotel. Of course our islands global military base spread the word early as well.
In Phoenix, the biggest change in 2024 was Waymo. I really did not see that coming so fast. They are everywhere, but the highways. I imagine what’s next in 2025, because of the math, are the accidents. I think Waymo is nevertheless here to stay and grow. Robots are in the operating rooms and on the streets, which is why I think most people are underweight robots in their portfolio.
In the media world, legacy media further accelerated into hell and increasing financial ruin and our new social media overloads accelerated into their own perverted definition of ‘free speech’ and endless conspiracy theories. The obvious opportunity is the new middle. I believe, with the data I see from some of our investments and my own spend that people with money that care about community and news and more truth will pay for this emerging media. I am spending a lot of time working and investing in this area right now (not just Stocktwits, Beehiiv, Punchup).
Fred Wilson chimed in on 2024 from his technology perspective and while we both agree it is the pairing of MAGA/TRUMP and Silicon Valley that is the story of 2024, Fred had a better and spicier take:
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.
Yes…BUCKLE UP.
We should be prepared to have all norms around venture capital, investing, trading, startups, stock markets and capital markets as technology mixes with American culture, politics and all the free time and accelerates the ‘degenerate economy’.
What is the definition of a startup in an era of decentralized AI agents?
Will Michael Saylor and his Microstrategy be able to corner the market in Bitcoin? I do think how this plays out will be the major financial story of 2025.
What is the definition of an IPO/startup in a world where Fartcoin was public on day one on the way to $1 billion?
What is the definition of a venture investor and even a hedge fund when Venture Capitalists are trading liquid tokens and hedge funds are buying Open AI and Waymo in the private markets.
Why even invest if you can get 5.5 percent (today at least) in your checking account (MaxMyInterest is a personal investment of mine and I am a customer).
Do high interest rates matter to stock investors if they market cap index into $QQQ? I know the textbooks say it matters, but the textbooks were written before the ‘Nifty Nine’ created products that continue to decline in price and they have cash balances that actually benefit them relative to everyone else (they are banks themselves) in times of higher rates.
As for the endless Cramer 2.0’s (Cramer 2.0 are the ZIRP and Web 2.0 thousandaires and billionaires that have a bigger audience than Jim Cramer) that roam social media spreading their expertise on all matters of global macro, trading and investing because they worked at a Unicorn or have mastered social media, buyer beware…prepare to be a bag holder…
Now go your degenerate ways and prosper…
