VC Outlook for 2016 Tech Industry: This Year Will Be the Year of Bitcoin, Valuation Will Be Very Low

Summary: VCs will follow Fidelity's lead and keep the valuations of their own investments very low. ...

There are some things that are inevitable at the beginning of the new year. For example, we always have to review the various work and achievements of the past year, and then come to the conclusion that "another year has been wasted, and we must work harder next year."

For example, industry experts always predict what the most important things will happen in the industry in the new year. Fred Wilson, one of the founders of venture capital firm Union Square and one of the most influential figures in the New York investment community, recently updated an article on his blog AVC, predicting the most important things in the Internet technology field in 2016.

He listed ten points. If you are interested, you can go to the blog to read the original text. The following is the translation:

What Is Going To Happen In 2016

1. Oculus will officially launch the Rift product. VR games and other applications will be released gradually. Oculus just announced on its official blog that the Touch controller will be delayed and will not be available until the second half of 2016, while the Rift will be shipped in Q1 as planned. I believe that the first version of the Rift will not leave a good impression on the market because the media has hyped VR too much. Games will be the strongest early application of VR, but not everyone will be willing to wear such a big headset to play games. I think the true potential of VR will only emerge when they find a way to make the application form of VR less awkward.

2. We’ll see a new form factor for wearables. The wrist isn’t the only place on our bodies where a computing device could fit in. If I had to guess, my ears stand a good chance, too.

3. One of the four largest tech companies will weaken. I think it will be Apple. Apple didn’t have a good 2015, and I think their 2016 will be even worse.

4. The FAA will regulate the commercial drone industry. Legalizing drone flights and setting various detailed rules will benefit the drone industry.

5. Regarding content publishing, it will become more common to publish content on social networks (Facebook is the most popular one). However, many high-profile content publishers cannot find a good monetization model on social networks. At least one will become a victim of this phenomenon and die.

6. Time Warner will spin off HBO so that it can develop independently and compete with Netflix. After independence, HBO will have a larger market value.

7. With the emergence of zero-interest P2P direct trading markets that use the Open Bazaar protocol as the underlying technology, Bitcoin is finally finding its killer app. (Pay attention to OB1, a third-party service built on the Open Bazaar framework, a project we invested in)

8. Slack will become so common in the enterprise that spam will become a problem. Third-party spam filters will start to appear on the Slack platform. At the same time, Slack will quickly become popular, and developing Slack platform versions of applications will become the next big thing for non-enterprise service software companies.

9. Donald Trump (a wealthy man who wants to be president and one of the most controversial figures in the United States in 2015) will be the Republican presidential candidate. He will attack the tech industry because of its support for immigrant workers (Donald Trump has a very negative attitude towards immigrants and once said that if he is elected president, he would deport tens of millions of illegal immigrants). So tech companies will unite to support Hillary Clinton, who will become the first female president.

10. VCs will start to lower their valuations of startups. They will follow Fidelity's lead and lower the valuations of their own portfolio companies. Crunchbase will record all of this, and in the process it will become the "Yahoo Finance" of startups. Employees will start to realize that the conditions they get at startups are not good, and leave startups in droves.

Whether Fred Wilson's prediction is accurate or not remains to be seen. But there is one person who can't wait to refute it - Mr. John Gruber, who is known to understand Apple better than Apple (so much so that some people even call Gruber and his blog DaringFireBall the blog department of Apple).

Less than a day after Fred Wilson published this blog post, John Gruber quoted the blog post on his blog and raised some questions about some of the points, which is very interesting. Among them, Gruber's biggest reaction was to Fred Wilson's argument that "Apple will be weak in 2016":

Everything is possible. But when Wilson tries to support this point with the argument that "Apple had a bad 2015", it makes me think that he doesn't really understand Apple. Just like he did in 2009 - Wilson sold all his Apple shares at $13 per share. Today Apple's stock price is $105.

Gruber also criticized the idea that Bitcoin will usher in a killer app:

The saying “next year is the year of Bitcoin” is like the old saying “next year is the year of desktop Linux”.

Gruber also cited Fred Wilson's optimism about Slack and commented:

I don’t think Fred Wilson is very good at prediction.

Not many people care whether the predictions are accurate or not. What they care about is the way the experts think and whether there is anything worth learning. What do you think will happen to the Chinese Internet in 2016?