We'll be back, but not until the industry discovers something of actual value.

My internal narrative of all of this is that many of us came up during the smartphone revolution which legitimately created a ton of new value. Products that could not exist before now could (and did!), resulting in a flurry of new companies, new products, and new ways of making money. This was the driving force during the past tech boom.

Then I think we started reaching the end of the smartphone boom. The industry needed to find some new technology that would similarly open a similar phase of rapid growth. It chose to bet on the gig economy, followed by crypto. Both of those were near-complete busts.

I think a lot of the pain we're experiencing is rooted in this. We're past the smartphone explosion but no real technology since then has actually unlocked a whole lot of new value, and in fact has burned investors badly.

Until we actually find this next-step technology things will be in the doldrums. Lots of people are betting on "AI" (or really just LLMs), and time will tell - I suspect it will be pretty transformative for some players and product areas but not in the industry-shaking way that is currently being hyped.

I have no doubt we'll find this at some point - after all technology continues to march forward, but I'm not convinced there is anything necessarily imminent that will drive the kind of growth smartphones did.