January 07, 2025
As we enter 2025, the venture market presents a striking dichotomy: soaring valuations for hot AI companies alongside a highly challenged environment for most other sectors. This has ignited a debate within the VC / startup ecosystem as to whether AI is fueling yet another bubble, and if so, to what extent. In parallel, there is a much broader societal debate happening both inside and outside of the tech community on the rise of AI being good vs. bad for us all as humans.
While AI is often portrayed as a threat, I believe this moment instead presents an opportunity for us to gain control back from the technology we’ve created and harness its power for a positive impact on humans and our society. For startups and other participants in the tech ecosystem, I see a generational opportunity to combine the collective strengths of what AI models are capable of alongside the uniquely human traits we possess to create new categories of businesses and reinvent age-old industries.
The “software-eating-the-world” phenomenon has, in many ways, made us subservient to technology. We spend much of our time entering data into systems, reading / responding to emails, searching the web for information, coding software, and so on. The current wave of AI has the potential to liberate us from many of these mundane tasks we’ve become accustomed to and instead allow us to work alongside technology in a more symbiotic relationship. With the widespread availability of cutting-edge AI models and powerful computing infrastructure, the stage is now set for an explosion of new applications that will completely reinvent technology user experiences as we know them. So while the venture market is forward investing and overvaluing most of the AI-native ecosystem that is still in its infancy, I believe we’re in the early innings of one of the largest value creation events the startup / tech ecosystem has ever seen.
Technology is at its best when we combine our human superpowers (creativity & ingenuity, empathy & EQ, trust & connection, etc.) with machine superpowers (accuracy & precision, speed & efficiency, predictability & reliability, etc.).
And that is the backdrop for my top investment themes for 2025:
Theme #1: AI Assistants for All
Theme #2: Voice as an Interface
Theme #3: “Collapsing the stack” of Infrastructure <> Applications
In the spirit of platform-shifts… I’ve moved over to Substack with a goal of posting more regularly. Link here.