18 Geeky Predictions for 2016

The season for VCs thinking that they can predict the future will start soon, get ready!

Written by Rodrigo Martinez · First published on Point Nine Land on Medium, December 2015

I will try to anticipate them, so it is not so obvious that most of the ideas are stolen from somebody smarter. ;-)

In my first try at being an oracle, I will focus on geeky stuff that I hope to understand some day.

#1 Security

Even the best can be a victim of ransomware, don’t hide it ;-)

• A large company will get bankrupt due to a major security breach.

• Most of us will “have a friend” who paid for ransom-ware.

• Mass-scale security attacks targeting SMBs will be the new norm — they are easier and more profitable.

#2 Bitcoin

There are other theories

• A bank will launch an altcoin. It will flop because they underestimated how hard it is to build network effects.

• We still won’t be able to explain the drivers for the volatility in the bitcoin price and the growth in the number of transactions — but everybody will have a thesis for it …

• A winner use case for bitcoin could emerge. My bet is on enterprises’ and SMBs’ using bitcoin-powered services for international payments.

#3 APIs

• If it wasn’t already the case, every new development will be API-first.

• We will see the first machine-to-machine API use cases. Another bet on IoT related stuff.

• Open source as a business model will be slowly, but surely, be taken over by APIs using SaaS as a business model.

#4 Dev tools

Is that a drunk whale?

• Atlassian will get unbundled — Slack <> Hipchat, Github <> Bitbucket, Jira <> ?, Confluence <> ? … — but don’t short them on the markets, just yet. ;-)

• Slack’s ecosystem will give birth to a future unicorn.

• Docker will build or buy everything within its ecosystem — they don’t take prisoners!

#5 Big data, ML, AI

Every cool new tech is like teenage sex …

• Big data will be commoditized. If you’re a CTO, your colleagues won’t think you’re crazy to use a 3rd party API for database management and analytics.

• Machine learning will be part of every pitch we will see. Most of the time, the value provided by ML will be limited.

• We won’t see AI becoming mainstream. The hype around it will come down to “disillusionment phase”, which means we will see the first successful cases emerging.

#6 Hardware, IoT, Drones

• We will have more smart/connected devices at work

• … We won’t have more of them at home

• We will see drones being adopted very fast in some industries.

Are you building a company in any of such trends?

Please get in touch @DecodingVC so next year I can sound smarter after investing on you :)