Welcome to issue #51 ofnext big thing.
I always enjoy looking back, and looking forward, as the year draws to a close.
2023 saw a couple of “Black Swan” events, inflation decelerate in the U.S., the public markets rebound after 2022’s decline, a lack of liquidity in the private capital markets, and artificial intelligence as the most talked about technology trend. A number of themes that defined the year were correctly identified in last year’s post, The next big thing in 2023 will be… (here are links to 2022 and 2021 as well), and I’m excited for you to read the insightful ideas contributed to this post looking ahead at what the next big thing will be in 2024.
AI dominates the predictions, as it did last year, with particular emphasis around productivity gains starting to materially show up in financial performance, and AI having an impact in various industries. There is excitement about consumer technology making a comeback (a sentiment that seemingly reoccurs every few years), GLP-1s (glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists, a class of drugs for managing obesity and diabetes) becoming even more mainstream and positively impacting health, and in-office culture being the norm. Given multiple ongoing wars and a U.S. presidential election, geopolitics unsurprisingly could take center stage, and for startups and venture capital fundraising, another tricky year could be in store.
I invite you (yes, you, reader!) to add your prediction by finishing the sentence in the comments, and wish you health and happiness in the new year.
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The next big thing in 2024 will be businesses seeing material improvements in productivity from AI, with ARR per employee increasing 10-15%.
-Tomasz Tunguz, Founder & General Partner at Theory Ventures
Thenextbigthingin2024willbe "Prototype to Production." In 2023 everyone was experimenting with AI. But there were lots of questions that limited the roll out of these experiments. What would they cost? Are they secure? What are the compliance risks? In 2024 a lot of these questions will be answered, and we'll see AI applications movingfrom experiments / prototypes / internal apps to large scale customer facing deployments.
-Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter Capital
The next big thing in 2024 will be startupsexperimenting with outcomes-based pricing. As GenAI starts to show quantifiable business impact, startups will move to align value creation incentives with their customers. Note what Intercom is trying with Fin- charging $1 per resolved ticket. This experimentation will be bumpy- I expect 2024 to be a learningyear.
-Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital
The next big thing in 2024 will be the greatest evolution of how we design, code, QA, A/B test, and deploy software — finally brought to life by AI. With the proliferation of AI enabled software tools in 2023, we will remember 2024 as the year that world class design, product, and engineering teams effectively integrate these new AI superpowers into all aspects of their everyday workflows, which hasn’t happened yet (most teams are still experimenting). 2024 will be remembered as the year when building software changed forever.
-Jeff Morris Jr., Founder & Managing Partner at Chapter One
… AI infrastructure.
The next big thing in 2024 will be AI models that push beyondthe limitations of the transformer architecture, giving us larger context windows, faster and cheaper inference, andmore powerful AI systems overall.
-Bucky Moore, Partner at Kleiner Perkins
The next big thing in 2024 will be a form of routing infrastructurefor LLMs. Cost is the most prohibitive element of LLM usage at scale. Companies will use multiple LLMs in real-time for different purposes. A breed with of companies will be formed around intelligently routing requests to the right LLM for the right use case.
-Harry Stebbings, Founder at 20VC
The next big thing in 2024 will be real-time, multimodal AI that’s embedded everywhere. While consumers have had access to multimodal AI in the last few months through ChatGPT, Bard and Bing it’s only now becoming available at the API layer. When combined with advancements in smaller, lower latency models this will lead to a Cambrian explosion of innovation at the edge of every app and connected device.
-John Milinovich, Head of Discovery at Canva
The next big thing in 2024 will be the open-source foundational model ecosystem, which will be a key enabler of enterprise adoption of GenAI. Data privacy concerns have been a hurdle to adoption thus far, and maturing open source models and training infrastructure will enable privacy-concernedenterprises to deploy GenAI while minimizing third-party risk.
-Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital
The next big thing in 2024 will be an explosion in AI agents of all kinds, focusing on every consumer need and on every kind of business transaction.
-Gokul Rajaram, Product and Business Helper at DoorDash
The next big thing in 2024 will beAI-native applications.Today, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are the “Excel” of LLMs – simple to start using but offer immense depth and potential to solve complex use cases for power users. Opportunities will emerge for AI-native SaaS applications — built AI-first from day one — to unbundle these complex/specialized workflows that are executed in Claude and ChatGPT today.
-Natalie Sandman, General Partner at Spark Capital
The next big thing in 2024 will be the re-rise of mobile-first productivity. It's no longer enough to have the world's information at our fingertips - we also expect the ability to make decisions and take actions wherever we are, both in the workplace and at home. Despite that, the mobile experience for productivity apps has degraded over the last few years as these products have gotten increasingly feature-heavy and browser-centric. Small models will enable iOS and Android to become true control centers while new AI-native apps will emerge that make us more efficient and collaborative than we ever thought possible.
-Shravan Narayen, Partner at IVP
The next big thing in 2024 will be services becoming productized thanks to GenAI. Businesses like McKinsey and Accenture will face pressure to productizeas tech-first startups like Mechanical Orchard offer their customers better, faster, cheaper outcomes enabled via GenAI.
-Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital
… AI x Enterprise.
The next big thing in 2024 will be large traditional enterprises actually realizing the benefits in productivity of generative AI as they find ways to get comfortable adopting this technology at scale within their organizations.
-Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik
The next big thing in 2024 will be the sustained rise of software tools that truly incorporate generative AI into enterprise workflows. 2023 saw a surge of add-on features, rapid experimentation, and sky-high expectations. 2024 will reveal how these tools perform when assessedon their ROI, adoption rates, ease of implementation, and security.
-Sam Dorison, Co-Founder & CEO at ReflexAI
The next big thing in 2024 will be the start of a troughof disillusionment for generative AI, but value will start to be realized as it is thoughtfully integrated into the core enterprise workflows and tooling.
-Jamie Davidson, Co-Founder at Omni
The next big thing in 2024 will be AI colliding with The Real Economy. I believe that more $10B outcomes in artificial intelligence will be with companies serving the Real Economy—we've already seen this with restaurants (Toast, Popmenu), Logistics (Flexport, Motive), Food (Instacart), and Finance (Nubank)—and leveraging AI at the application layer, rather than startups building in the infrastructure layer.
-Adeyemi Ajao, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Base10 Partners
The next big thing in 2024 will be advancements in"hardtech" areas like space exploration, biology, robotics, semiconductors, and battery technology, driving an increase in venture capital investment in these sectors. Concurrently, “real economy” industries such as supply chain, construction, and real estate, will go through significant transformation enabled by artificial intelligence.
-Lan Xuezhao, Founder & Managing Partner at Basis Set Ventures
… AI x Healthcare.
The next big thing in 2024 will be the continued convergence between biotechnology and AI.
-Deven Parekh, Managing Director at Insight Partners
The next big thing in 2024 will be a paradigm shift in health focused on promoting wellness instead of treating sickness, and prevention rather than intervention. Using AI, data, advanced diagnostics, every individual will have a deeper understanding of their own biology, predispositions, and the interventions that will keep them healthy.
-Talia Goldberg, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
The next big thing in 2024 will be solving problems in health with bio + AI — which make it more accessible, affordable, and higher quality care.
-Kristina Simmons, Founder & Managing Partner at Overwater Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be consumers using (and consuming) ai without even knowing they are doing so.
-Tiffany Zhong, Founder at nospace
The next big thing in 2024 will be generative content (some good a lot bad) - video and 3D are the next models to progress. I’m also excited for the Vision Pro launch.
-Amy Wu, Partner at Menlo Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly in areas like natural language processing, automation, and personalized technology solutions.
The next big thing in 2024 will be AI-powered personalized experiences blurring the lines between physical and digital.
-Bard
… AI causing trouble.
The next big thing in 2024 will be our first "uh-oh" moments with AI-caused trouble. It will be something salacious and attention-grabbing: a Midjourney+ Elevenlabs generated fake news causing an unrest or someone famous claiming an embarrassing"real photo" is actually AI-generated. The upcoming 2024 election will be “fun" backdrop to all this.
Also, a real, true-and-true white collar company will have the first AI-driven reduction in force. Think of Amazon laying off an entire moderation team based in the US or Google firing engineers. It's left as an exercise to the reader to decide if this is good or bad.
-Can Duruk, Co-Founder & CTO at Felt
The nextbig thing in 2024 will be voice-first AI applications. Voice will be a new emerging way to interact with technology and the heart of a new set of productivity apps.LLMs can deliver voice-first productivity at a level far beyond Siri + other legacy agents. This will give every person an assistant on-call (literally). Audio allows for more natural and higher fidelity interactions, and tools built on this will become integral to our lives.
-Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
The next big thing in 2024 will be the rise of personalized UIs that are generated on the fly, adapt to the use case, and are multimodal and dynamic. This means fewer chat bot interfaces and more ambient, voice first, and generative UIs.
-Talia Goldberg, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
… consumer technology.
Thenextbigthingin2024willbe a consumer AI application built by young technical founders with unhinged imagination such that it will be bigger than ChatGPT in its first year.
-Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director at General Catalyst
The next big thing in 2024 will be the revival of consumer technology, with science-backed health and wellness products leading the way.Health-conscious consumers are seeking voices of authority and efficacious products supported by scientific evidence. This will create new opportunities for doctors-turned-founders whose deep expertise and knowledge-sharing have earned them devoted audiences in the creator economy. The trust they have built with their communities will translate into cost-effective customer acquisition, strong customer lifetime value and strategic product development opportunities that culminate in robust, efficient businesses.
-Lisa Wu, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners
Thenextbigthingin2024willbe GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound transforming the health and food patterns of tens of millions of Americans. By curbing appetite and reducing cravings, these drugs reduce absolute food, while increasing the need for functional nutrition like protein-heavy diets. These drugs are already 8% of all prescriptions, but are still not mainstream - the oral pill version is yet to come (currently injection-only) and insurance coverage is limited. Only ~15 million people are on GLP-1 drugs today but, given the overall health benefit of reducing obesity, and provided the drugs remain safely prescribed, this could grow to 100 million in the next 5 years.
-Bharat Vasan, President & COO at The Production Board
The next big thing in 2024 will be GLP-1s continuing their ascent. As new uses are discovered (e.g. addiction), awareness spreads, and prescriptioninfrastructure develops, they willbecome the biggest prescription drug of all time. In parallel, payers / employers / prescribers will look to pair the drug with dietitians to control costs, increase medication adherence, mitigate side effects, and implement long-term behavior change that prevents rebound weight gain.
-Aidan Dewar, Co-Founder & CEO at Nourish
… sustainable energy.
Thenextbigthingin2024willbe a significant breakthrough on energy, creatinga lot of hope for the future of humanity.
-Lenny Rachitsky, Founder at Lenny’s Newsletter
The next big thing in 2024 will be flexible and programmable infrastructure for sustainable energy.As the energy markets evolve due to regulatoryshifts, behavioral change, and the possibility and proliferation of new options (solar for now, nuclear eventually, for instance), the grid is getting increasingly decentralized. This requires a new wave of energy infrastructure that is flexible and programmable. Both software and hardware platformswill emerge to enable this shift and be fundamental infrastructure for a new sustainable energy ecosystem.
-Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV
The next big thing in 2024 will be AI- and edge computing-supercharged environmental intelligence and weather forecasts.
-Kathleen Chaykowski, Head of Communications & Marketing at WindBorne Systems
The next big thing in 2024 will be direct air capture. As the climate crisis becomes more dire, we’ll see increased funding and innovations emerge around the world. The US will become the early leader of building and scaling direct air capture facilities that give us a shot at removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere before it's too late.
-Katie Jacobs Stanton, Founder & General Partner at Moxxie Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be greater awareness of the interplay between compute and energy. Data center capex is rising, and the magnitude and quantity of large-scale model training runs is only going up. The compute scale up will be very energy-hungry, and companies will figure out ways to efficiently, cleanly, and safely procure energy. Microsoft is making a bet on nuclear. Crusoe (not an investor) is another company to watch.
-Aashay Sanghvi, Partner at Haystack
The next big thing in 2024 will be a ton of movement in the robotics industry. Figure and Tesla are newer entrants for humanoids and I expect the landscape to explode. Fundamental infrastructure to build them has been built by legacy players. Opportunities in manufacturing alone are in the trillions in terms of market opportunity.
-Nichole Wischoff, Founder & General Partner at Wischoff Ventures
… software-to-software communication.
The next big thing in 2024 will be software to software communication.Originally markets and work involved human to human communicationand collaboration. Then that shifted to human to software communication and collaboration. We are now in a transition to software to software communication--over the next decade, systems will talk to other systemsmore than humans talk to systems. That movement will require a whole new technology stack and will break a lot of the tooling and platforms we have come to depend on. Data, billing, payments, security, monitoring, reporting platforms are all evolving with this.
-Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV
The next bit thing in 2024 will be the culling of the herd of unicorns.
Startups are the engine of innovation. It's good for the world when more startupsget funded and try to build solutions to hard problems. However, for many reasons, the past couple years have created a number of unsustainable companies. Companies that don't have demonstrableproduct-market fit, yet were well capitalized. Although we saw some of these companiesgo out of the business in '23, my prediction is that '24 will be the year we see the true culling of the herd.
Althoughthis will be very hard on many teams and investors, the startups ecosystem needs these events to recycletalent and prioritizecapital into the most importantcompanies. Startups will continue to be the innovation engine of theworld.
-Chad Byers, Co-Founder & General Partner at Susa Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be bridgerounds. While larger firms are chasing momentum rounds with valuations detached from fundamentals in AI, there will be a LOT of great companies with PMF, proven unit economics and strong growth, just not strong enough to get most of the multi-billion AUM funds excited. With reserves depleted for most insiders, outsiders will need to come in and find some great companies at reasonable multiples that will likely drive some amazing long-term returns. Great companies don't need to belong to hype cycles, they just need to be great companies.
-Rick Zullo, Co-Founder & General Partner at Equal Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be the reappearance of small (sub $1b market cap) IPOs. While most of the attention will be on Stripe and SHEIN behemoths, we'll start to see some small cap listings of tech companies that are profitable/near profitable and looking for liquidity options outside of M&A or secondary sales. These may take the shape of direct listings in some cases, and come with extended insider/investor lockups in order to manage float and volatility, but IPO will rightfully be put back on the table for softwarecompanies who don't want to, or can't, manufacture buyouts.
-Hunter Walk, Co-Founder & Partner at Homebrew (working on it)
The next big thing in 2024 will be startups rediscovering the joy of capital efficiency and controlling their destinies!
-Charles Hudson, Founder & Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures
… a flight to quality.
Thenextbigthingin2024willbe continued flight to quality by LPs. LPs are projecting capital calls to once again outpace distributions for 2024 as the exit market remains shut. This means I expect LP to continue to carefully assess their portfolios, digging in to understand the underlying health of their indirect companies and then selectively re’up’ing with managers they have conviction can generate outperformance.
I also see a high potential in 2024 for the continued contraction in the number of venture funds raised and their size. Along with this, I anticipate seeing the retirement of some established investors countered by seeing a number of newer investors spin out to start the next generation of venture funds.
-Beezer Clarkson, Partner at Sapphire Partners
Thenextbigthingin2024will be consolidation amongthe zombie venture funds and startups. The M&A scene may not include as many big dollar sign headlines, but the sales will help clean up some of the correction that is happening in startups, and maybe lead to more interesting spin outs in the future.
-Natasha Mascarenhas, Reporter at The Information
The next big thing in 2024 will be quality technology public stocks proving yet again to be the best risk-adjusted sources of return for the long term.
The managements of technology businesses, specifically mid-to-large cap, have learned some tough lessons post ZIRP, and have re-structured their costs, are re-focusing on operating discipline and capital allocation.
Software businesses should see fundamental demand for their services as cost optimizations have troughed across the board at their enterprise customers, Internet businesses should gain market share relative to their offline counterparts (and especially so if we have consumer recession in the US), and payments businesses should see multiples increase (post-capitulation) as rates remain steady (and potentially even decline).
After a strong 2023, another six months of strength should result in the IPO window finally opening again, especially as long duration assets become more attractive. Databricks and Stripe, I am looking at you to bring much needed liquidity to the tech markets!
-Ram Parameswaran, Founder at Octahedron Capital
The next big thing in 2024 will be a fresh approach to private equity predicated on data moat and business transformation with AI.
-ChenLi Wang, General Partner at WndrCo
… a new profile of founder.
The next big thing in 2024 will be a new profile of successful founder. As AI/ML development accelerates by the day, the profile of successful founders is evolving. Traditional strong backgrounds, often defined by elite academic credentials and substantial histories of employment in specific high-profile tech companies, are becoming less essential. A“textbook”machine learning engineer might get less done than a long-time open-source contributor in the new age of AI.
It’s critical for VCs to be able to“see”founders with a broad spectrum of experiences, unconventional educational paths, professional histories, and unique personal journeys. Those who stick to old paradigms and judge founders purely based on their credentials on paper will see their returns erode.
-Lan Xuezhao, Founder & Managing Partner at Basis Set Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be a total shift in organizational culture & how we build companies. All major economic & technology revolutions have not only changed what we build but how we build. Industrial Revolution —> specialization, assembly line. Software Revolution —> lean startup, agile, fast iterations. Internet / Cloud / Mobile Revolution —> screen based work, distributed teams. And now, the AI Revolution.
The AI Revolution is already changing how we work, but 2024 is going to be in a league of its own. We’ll be building in extreme ambiguity and increasing pace of change. AI will replace core skill sets we used to hire for. A single person will be able to be 100x more creative & productive on their own.
The best companies will figure out a new operating system from first principles. The rest will try to use old methods & will miss the boat. “Best practices” are no longer best practices. Work will look very different in 2024.
-Tara Viswanathan, Co-Founder & CEO at Rupa Health
… in the office.
The next big thing in 2024 will be the return to the office! For most of 2023 we saw wavering stances from CEOs in fear of massive churn. By the summer, I think we will be back to 4 days a week in office across major fortune 500s, with a cascading effect down into big tech. This will lead many to quit (mostly those who were ready to leave anyways) but will also increase efficiency and bring those closest to the company back in alignment around what it takes to not just survive, but win.
-Brian Hollins, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Collide Capital
The next big thing in 2024 will be office culture. Starting an in-office company will go back in vogue. We are officially in a post-Covid world (not that Covid isn't over, it's just fact-of-life now). As employers gain leverage, they'll start dictating more of the terms and one of them will be wanting people back in office. It's not clear if this will be an alpha or not. Maybe a positive on the margins, but not a real game changer either way.
-Can Duruk, Co-Founder & CTO at Felt
The next big thing in 2024 will be new platforms that enable the fractionalization of knowledge work.We have seen a gradual shift to fractional and self-directed work. Platforms like Uber and DoorDash catapulted the gig economy forward. A wave of marketplaces have superpowered fractional shift based work in areas like healthcare. Now we are going to see a major push toward fractional talent across knowledge work and innovation. Success and reward will be determined by project based outcomes instead of time based tenures. People will toggle up and down loads and projects, leveraging super skills across companies instead of going deep vertically into single roles. And new platforms will emerge to enable and maximize these interactions.
-Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV
… geopolitical.
The next big thing in 2024 will be the global rise in nationalism, making the sovereignty of technology — software and hardware — and defense applications more important than they have been in 40 years.
-Kanyi Maqubela, Co-Founder & General Partner at Kindred Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be centrism! In this upcoming year given the election, proliferation of AI, geopolitical unrest and amediocre economy that can continue to divide us, I'moptimistic thatfinding middle ground will be the new "extreme."
-Ellen DaSilva, Founder & CEO at Summer Health
The next big thing in 2024 will be in geopolitics. We are at an awkward impasse with China, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and now the turmoil in Gaza has distracted us, but both of these will "normalize" in 2024 and we'll go back to America flexing its muscles for real this time. Will the 2024 Olympics be tense? It could be. Still betting that TikTok will get some treatment in 2024, piggybacking on my prediction from last year.
-Can Duruk, Co-Founder & CTO at Felt
The next big thing in 2024 will be Japan and Korea experiencing increased venture funding from the U.S., benefiting from the heightened tensions between the U.S. and China.
-Lan Xuezhao, Founder & Managing Partner at Basis Set Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be India's arrival as a tech landscape of substance. We will see this impacting consumers and investors. Consumers: We will see a wave of Indian consumer founders emerge building for US / global markets from the get go (unlike now when it is a reaction to the Indian market saturation). Investors: For long India has been sold on promise (future exits); but as a rush of tech / startupsIPOs get ready to launch in the last 12-18m, that promise will finally get realised. More and more LPs are showing interest in India, thanks to this and as the key alternative to China. Our time is coming. Apna time aa raha hai (a reworking of a famous line in Bollywood move Gullyboy - inspired by Eminem's 8 Mile)!
-Sajith Pai, Partner at Blume Ventures
… old, not new.
The next big thing in 2024 will be the expansion of DeFi to enable borderless payments at scale.
Over the last decade, the concept of borderless payments was frequently hailed as crypto’s killer use case. Designed to operate globally from the start, crypto payments could make moving money faster, cheaper, and more resistant to hyperinflation. But for an idea arguably as old as the industry itself, we still have yet to see platforms solving this problem for consumers at scale.
Things are changing, however, as the facts surrounding borderless payments’ feasibility have changed as the industry has evolved. Specifically, the last few years have seen massive developments across the infrastructure stack. Blockchains have become faster and cheaper (particularly, the Solana blockchain has emerged as a popular choice for builders in this category). Self-custody wallets have been made more user-friendly by way of account abstraction and multi-party computation. Stablecoin APIs have matured and their use cases have expanded. This new set of tools has provided an increasingly compelling foundation on which companies in this category can be created. I’m optimistic that 2024 and beyond will usher in even more companies that are building on the foundation of what consumers need. Perhaps what once was old is new again.
-Gaby Goldberg, Investor at TCG Crypto
The next big thing in 2024 will be ... old, not new.
As consumers, especially Gen Z, shift their spend away from generic products from big retailers to vintage & reworked finds that are one of a kind.
I expect to see more founders like Berriez, 4G Seller, Vintage Broncos, A Current Affair, and a wave of flea markets, estate sales, and thrifting for just about everything.
-Brianne Kimmel, Founder & Managing Partner at Worklife Ventures
The next big thing in 2024 will be the proliferation of retail media networks, expanding beyond the large players (Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, etc) into a longer-tail of retailers/marketplaces. We're seeing a perfect storm of factors: ATT/privacy-related challenges forcing demand-side channel diversification & supply-side use of 1P data, increased pressure to monetize, and more accessible railsto spin up in-house ad networks. One result of this: a broader set of marketplaces will have viable business models, as the critical scale for ads to work has lowered.
-Mike Duboe, General Partner at Greylock Partners
… brand.
The next big thing in 2024 will be… Brand! Solid performance marketing has become table-stakes (and also very expensive). So the next cohort of stand out companies will be defined by brand building, creativity, and long term thinking.
-Connor Archbold, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Tracksuit
The next big thing in 2024 will be a boom in the number of professionaleCommerce re-sellers. eComm is scooping up consumer spend, and the appetite for usedgoods will continue to grow. Lululemon just launched their own used items offering to resell returns. A play on my own portfolio company Ergo, but we'll be back to bartering in terms of pricing, especially for already-discount items and used as that grows.
-Nichole Wischoff, Founder & General Partner at Wischoff Ventures
… online ;).
The next big thing in 2024 will be… another big year for the internet.
-David Rosenthal, Co-Founder & Co-Host at Acquired
I startednext big thingto share unfiltered thoughts. I’d love your feedback, questions, and comments!
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