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.
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.
We can confirm that there was a successful 51% attack on Ethereum Classic [1]
[1] 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.
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.
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.
You could use that excuse for almost anything morally repugnant.
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").
Of course. Greed drives only those fishy defense corporations. Any other for-profit organization is driven purely by desire to change the world for the better. Like Facebook, you know...
You can do defense right, you can do it wrong. But you can't do it at all. Like it or not.
Not all its fault perhaps but the general approach seems to be doing ok
the military works fine as a jobs and training program (for defensive readiness), but we don't need more, and more expensive, weapons. we can already destroy the world a thousand times over.
The sector is bonkers and the incentives are terrible. Most tech adoption is in the low-margin high-volume sectors, where 'good enough' products are dominant. Superior execution in this segment could lead to big wins. In the low-volume high-margin sector, many firms have proprietary workflows/inhouse staff dealing with their KM needs.
That said, there's a few cute 'novel' approaches in new generation TAR and AI assisted [Insert mass document type sorting/classifying/digesting]. Beyond that I think the big developments aren't going to be in the area of 'can technology do something fundamentally new'. They'll be enabling tools to allow new business models. Think 'data-science consulting, reporting and expert witness testimony for legal discovery databases'.
I also think that overall, professional development tools are underdeveloped, but young lawyers are undercapitalized and the core value bottleneck in low-volume work is the client intake pipeline, not getting good people to do the work.
Edit: Added a missing word.
H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714
1. Law is highly interpretable, it can't be just 1/0. Facts are 1/0, but not the law 2. Law firms tend to be small in size, generally <200, Lawyers are inclined to start their own practice ASAP. That limits the software provider's capability to charge more or upsell. Also, the law firms can't afford to buy a lot of software. 3. The distrust among people in the legal industry is just baffling
There are a few more challenges, but am able to recollect only a few.
(am a software engineer and my brother is a lawyer. we keep trying to build solutions for law firms)
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.
You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.
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.
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.
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).
$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
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.
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.
"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)...
* Slack acquired Missions
* Trello acquired Butler
* GitHub launched Actions
* Zapier’s success ($35m ARR)
* The ridiculous numbers of Zapier clones out there
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.
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?
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
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.
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/ for what you get when you replace SQL with a simpler database! (We're seeking investment)
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.
