The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Benioff: Salesforce Will Not Hire Software Engineers in 2025 Due to AI
“We're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with AgentForce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30% to the point where our engineering velocity is …”
Lemkin: 2026 will mark the end of entry-level sales jobs
“There'll be, this is the year where we will see the end of so many entry-level sales jobs. We still need AEs. We still need people knocking on doors. We do not need two-year-old kids sending emails. Those jobs will disappear.”
Kohli predicts all 15-minute delivery startups will go bust
“A hundred percent. Because the cost of capital goes up. And when the cost of capital goes up, you can't invest into launching new cities. And you can't invest into what typically ends up being the J curve of this type of a business where you end up losing mone…”
Olteanu: AI foundational models will commoditize like compute power
“Foundational models. I think they will get commoditized like compute, and I think the companies who deliver the last mile will be the ones to capture most value.”
Emil Michael predicts Uber's Postmates and Careem acquisitions will be total write-downs
“I think we, instead of buying Kareem in the Middle East, Postmates, Jump Bike I think all of those will be a hundred percent write downs. Those are some of the worst acquisitions done in tech. Maybe Postmates may be the worst acquisition done tech in the last …”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic and SpaceX's next funding rounds will be IPOs
“You've got to believe that the next round for this, Antropic, and SpaceX are all public offerings.”
Lemkin: Elon Musk Will Not Settle With OpenAI and Will Win
“They ain't going to settle for that. He's going to go to trial and he's going to win.”
Ehrenberg: State Gaming Tax Hikes Drive Consumers to Offshore Markets
“And the more that, you know, Illinois jacks up rates, In state, A, those, the regulated sports, the sports books that are subject to these rates reduce investment in the state, handle those down, tax revenue goes down, and those customers that are now getting …”
Deeter: AI Will Double Vertical SaaS TAM and Valuation Just Like Payments Did
“I think AI is going to do the same thing, that what it can do you know, with Service Titan, as they talk about automating the technician experience and the ability to go out there and have a co-pilot alongside of you.”
Lemkin: B2B software vendors will bundle AI for free in SMB plans
“Next generation AI for B to B, as you approach true SMB, it's more and more going to be base and included with a limited upsell opportunity.”
Lemkin: Stripe, Figma, Chime, and Canva will IPO within 18 months
“Stripe, Figma Chime, the list of folks north of five hundred million, ok, Canva, three billion, that are gonna IPO in the next 18 months.”
Villig: AV developers like Waymo will not operate ride-hailing fleets long-term
“My view is that most of these companies Like Waymo over the longterm don't want to operate a car network. It's just too much hassle. So I think that these companies can build what they're fantastic at, which is building the software. And then there's going to …”
Lemkin: CrowdStrike product upsells will be put on hold for three quarters
“So I think almost upsells are going to have to go on hold for like, you know, three quarters.”
Traynor: AI infrastructure will consolidate into 3-4 providers in direct price competition
“There'll probably be three or four big providers is my guest, probably GCP, AWS, maybe open AI directly. And I'm sure Azure, that's how I think that that layer will play out. And they'll end up in direct price competition with each other.”
Harry Stebbings: Tech M&A market will stall across all deal sizes
“So I think M&A is going to go to shit. I think anything sub a billion is not meaningful enough for M&A teams and corp dev teams to actually engage with. And I think anything over a billion is going to be incredibly arduous to get over the line from a regulator…”
Stebbings: Tech IPO market will not re-open until H2 2025
“But I think it's going to be longer. Like, you know, it, you'll see it in the update coming out this weekend, but it's like, you know, data breaks, stripe, it's not going to be enough to actually crack open the IPO markets like we think it will be, I don't thi…”
Lemkin: Tech Market Will See an IPO Week in H2 2024
“I have a lot of money with Harry that it's an IPO week in the second half of twenty-twenty-four.”
Lemkin: Venture mega funds will resurge in late 2024 and 2025
“I think they're going to reflate at the end of next year. I think there will be a resurgence of mega funds in late 2024 and 20 25.”
Lemkin: VC dollar deployment into AI will double in 2024
“I'm talking about dollars. I'm convinced right or wrong, it's going to double next year, even if it makes no actual sense. It's going to, it's too big.”
Khosla: Cheaper, 70% less-carbon cement plants will become operational in 2023
“Already I can say the cement we are producing will be 70% less carbon, and our first plants will be operational this year and cheaper. Then traditional Portland cement.”
Douwe Kiela: Foundation model builders will rely on external AI security audits
“And so that's a, an interesting part of the market, but I don't think that, that the actual foundation model builders like open AI and contextual are going to build that technology in house. It's probably gonna be an external sort of audit.”
Carney: The Federal Reserve Will Cap Interest Rates at 5.25%
“And you know, if we had been talking at the end of February, early March before Silicon Valley bank, I would have said something to the effect of, I think the fed may have to go to six percent fed funds. Now I think they'll probably stop at five, five and a qu…”
Jack Brody predicts Snap will take off in Japan despite LINE
“You know, Japan has been a very interesting market for us. I've always thought that that is a market in which, you know, snap would really take off because there are certain elements to it. It's very visual. It's, you know, it's playful. The lenses that we off…”
Kohli: Pay-to-play startup rounds will accelerate through late 2023
“And so our view is that these will start ticking up in Q two and then definitely Q three, Q four, because these startups, they have a brick wall, right?”
Armstrong: Coinbase will evolve into a holding company of decentralized units
“The future is a little hard to predict, but look, here's one vision I've had for it, which is that I think Coinbase Global, the parent company is starting to become more like a holding company over time. And we have this portfolio of different products, differ…”
Emil Michael predicts tech down rounds in Q4/Q1, shutdowns in Q2/Q3
“I think we're at the end of the beginning, though, not the end of the end. The next phase is structured rounds, down rounds, like true down rounds and then sales were, unfortunately, companies sort of not making it, and I think that'll happen in Q one, you kno…”
Conrad: Rippling partner products will have equal distribution to internal SKUs
“No, I think, I mean, we have a really robust partner ecosystem, and I think you know, our goal is to have you know, companies that we partner with that, that compete against internal rippling products on even footing. And not just in the sense that, you know, …”
Levie: Venture market will see gradual correction, not a bubble burst
“We will see a correction. I just don't believe it's going to be a sudden correction that will feel like a sort of bubble burst. I think it'll be, you know, more pressure for keeping valuations in some reasonable band that still, compared to 15 years ago, will …”
Ehrenberg: Tech PE will fill M&A void but pay lower valuations
“And maybe what that speaks to, Harry, is a further rise of firms like Vista and Insight. So you have tech PE start to step into the shoes of M&A. The issue there, though, is they don't pay as much. Somebody like Vista, you know, they have accumulated a bunch o…”
Carney: Central bank digital currencies will operate at the wholesale level
“Well, one of the things I expect to happen is that there will be central bank digital currencies. That they will be at the wholesale level. So they will serve many of the wholesale applications of some of the stable coins and others.”
Eisenberg: Market bust will reallocate tech talent but won't reduce salaries
“A bust in the past and maybe now would reallocate some of that talent around. I actually don't think it would reduce the cost of it for what it's worth, given how scarce the talent is, but I think it could reallocate it to better places.”
Nigel Morris: Leading challenger banks will successfully cross-sell broad product suites
“In the new world of digitalization, we will see the best Challenger banks and entities make cross-selling work, and you will see the new banks of this world have student lending and asset management and a full vista of different products.”
Velez predicts major neobank consolidation as consumers reduce financial apps
“Customers will have less apps in their phone, not more, and they will not have five banking relationships or 10 banking relationships or five different wallets. So I would expect a significant consolidation of that over the next few years”
Tenev: The shift toward direct individual retail investing is permanent
“I think it's a permanent shift. I think there's a movement in this country that has started and is continuing to have more of the investing done by individuals directly.”
Ariel Cohen Predicts Business Travel Will Rebound Stronger Post-COVID
“I have strong belief that people, once it is done, will get back to travel, to business travel, even in a stronger way.”
Howie Liu: No-code market will be as big or bigger than cloud computing
“We think that this category could be worth literally tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in the future, right? This is going to be as big or bigger than cloud computing.”
DHH: Remote Work Is Inevitable for Creative Computer Work
“Seems like an historic inevitability that remote work is going to take off and going to be the dominant force of How we work when we do creative work that can be done in front of a computer from anywhere.”
Smith: Bain expects Lime to generate a 15x to 20x return
“My bet was really believing that Lime is the ability to get us positive economics and more than 15 to 20 X from here.”
Brex will be the world's top corporate credit card by 2024
“I hope Brex in five years is the number one corporate credit card in the world in all industries and all sizes. And I'm still the CEO.”
Somerville: Micro VC funds will face harder fundraising as LP market saturates
“It will increasingly become harder to raise subsequent iterations or to scale, and I think you've started to see that with even some groups that have a track record now and have done a pretty decent job struggling to find new LPs on the institutional side to c…”
Xie: The smart contract market will consolidate to two or three platforms
“I think that there's going to be kind of this, like, Two to three winner take all. I really think that sorry, I guess maybe take most.”
Lee: ICO crash will trigger capital flight to Bitcoin and Litecoin
“I think there will be a slight to quality. So people would Sell their tokens for Ether, and potentially sell their Ether for Bitcoin. So, it would crash a lot of the ICO tokens, a lot of the altcoins, but I think it would be good for the stronger currencies ou…”
Hargreaves predicts severe economic pain for commercial retail landlords
“If I am neutral on residential, I am very bearish on retail in particular, and I think, you know, we're just at the beginning stages of the immense amount of pain That retail landlords are going to face.”
Levine: High startup entry valuations will drag down overall VC returns
“And so if you're making much lower returns on your rate investments, you won't be able to afford to cover the bad investments. And basically that just means the returns of the industry are going to get dragged down.”
Chang: Startups face an upcoming Series A and Series B funding crunch
“Let's call a spade a spade, and there is no real seed two or seed three. That's basically a bridge, right? That pretty much means you haven't found proper product market fit to extend over into a proper series A, so we will see a big series A crunch series B c…”
Helgason: Augmented reality will be massive and almost entirely business-focused
“It's going to be massive. It's going to be massive in a very different way. Whereas VR, I think, is all entertainment. Business users that are sort of entertainment-like, you know, kind of looking at products and things like that. Whereas AR, AR is going to be…”
De Masi: Tech Unicorns Face Forced Consolidation and Declining Valuations
“When I look at the unicorns today, you know, you're gonna see forced consolidation, you're gonna see continued gas error being let out of valuations here, and people resist it Using clever capital structures, endless consolidation, and hope that they can hold …”
De Masi: Mobile gaming will consolidate into fewer companies within three years
“There's going to be huge consolidation in gaming, and I think that there will be, you know, fewer, bigger, better companies in the next two, three years with better profit margins. Ultimately, less global competition in mobile gaming than there is now.”