A Retrospective on 10 Years of Top Tech Trend Predictions

Debating the top 5-year technology forecasts with VCs that do this for a living can get wildly competitive… challenging each other to be impactful yet non-obvious, and not repeating a decade’s worth of prior predictions!

Kevin Gao of Kinetic Ventures compiled the history of predictions: blog post with transcripts and Twitter summary.

A summary of my top-10 tech trends (looking forward 5 years in each case):

2008: Gig economy, online education and AI
2009: Decentralization/Edge
2012: EVs and Exponential Compute (GPU & Quantum)
2013: Machine Learning and a Widening Wealth Gap
2015: Satellite Internet and Autonomous cars
2017: Voice and Local Compute/AI Chips

Here is a short video clip for a sense of how intense it can be. Prediction: “Within five years we will no longer debate the long-term inevitability of electric vehicles. We can’t shift a billion cars in five years, but we can shift a billion minds.” +Context: this was 2012, one week before I took delivery of the first Tesla Model S. Every VC on the panel voted against this prediction — Accel, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, and most vociferously, Thiel.