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Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

blog.eladgil.com

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Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#21

Post by mattnewton »

eladgil wrote: post #6
strgrd wrote: post #3

"I am still quite bullish that a basked of cryptocurrencies will be worth in the trillions within the next 10 years. The primary short term driver for crypto value with be the generational replacement of gold as a store-of-value for a specific subset of the population. The longer term drivers of crypto value will be new forms of programable money and on-chain securities." What subset of the population is going to rep…

Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).

I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#22

Post by gfodor »

mattnewton wrote: post #21
eladgil wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).

I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.

Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#23

Post by dustingetz »

"taking a SQL database or excel spreadsheet and turning it into an app platform"

A key insight here is that SQL is too complicated for this to ever work, and also the trend towards functional programming (React.js, Scala etc) – see http://www.hyperfiddle.net/ for what you get when you replace SQL with a simpler database! (We're seeking investment)

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#24

Post by ideashower »

hackathonguy wrote: post #20

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

I'd love to hear more about the legal tech space in general.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#25

Post by csomar »

strgrd wrote: post #3

"I am still quite bullish that a basked of cryptocurrencies will be worth in the trillions within the next 10 years. The primary short term driver for crypto value with be the generational replacement of gold as a store-of-value for a specific subset of the population. The longer term drivers of crypto value will be new forms of programable money and on-chain securities." What subset of the population is going to rep…

10 years is enough for a newer generation to rise and make money. Those in the 15-25 right are quite adapt with Crypto. They'll be the next investors. Granted, if they are wise they won't put all of their liquid there. But if the 30-60 of the current world put a little in crypto; its' market value will fly out of the sky.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#26

Post by sf_rob »

gfodor wrote: post #22
mattnewton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.

Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)

I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#27

Post by oh_sigh »

alexgmcm wrote: post #11
fhood wrote: post #9

"5 core markets (Devsumer, Real Estate, AI hardware, Transportation and Logistics, Crypto) and 2 emerging ones (Legal, Defense)" Devsumer? For sure. Simplifying dev work seems like an area with pretty much eternal growth potential. But I find it hard to get excited about many of the others. Interacting with the government (defense) still seems to take buckets of money, and there are already large companies that do so…

>I kinda thought that the software+real-estate process had a whole lot of established players, but I could easily just be ignorant of some of the growth areas. In my city in Spain letting agents still charge 10% of the annual rent as a fee when they do little more than print out a pre-written contract and hand you the keys. Apparently it is common in Italy too. This seems like an area ripe for disruption.

That's how it works in NYC as well.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#28

Post by 40acres »

The one trend I'm sensing is that difficult human/technology problems that were once thought of as 'solved' are now becoming hard again. Think of microprocessors as a model, for years Moore's law was running smoothly and you could set you watch on upgrading your PC at least once every 3 years.

The rate of improvement is slowing down as it becomes more capital intensive to advance chips, all the while the demand for performant chips is increasing. We will need another transistor level breakthrough to fuel the next 25 years of microprocessor based improvement.

You can see this trend also with energy on a longer timescale: oil and coal is the fuel that propelled the industrial revolution and human advancement for the past 150 years. Climate change demands that new forms of energy take the forefront: innovations in nuclear power and electricity transportation and storage are needed.

If I were in an investor with a ton of cash I would look to past and explore innovations and ideas around the industrial revolution and try to apply those models to the next 50 years. I really do think we are approaching a similar point in human history where there will need to be a large set of fundamentally new discoveries to continue pushing us forward.

As an aside, I think "devsumer" is also a great area. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I can't think of a labor force that is producing as much global value (in agreed upon terms) as software developers, creating tools for this labor force is going to continue to be big business.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#29

Post by tehjoker »

Ah defense. It's just common sense that we should pour money into the military. We're just out to make money, there's definitely not an entire political viewpoint entangled in this "market opportunity". Those crazy radicals that are against killing pointlessly for imperial gains don't understand the real world. In the real world, we need the military to make the world safe for capital. WW1 was a smashing success, as were Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and all extremely clearly benefited the working class and made zero money for industrialists. If anything, these wars were entirely unselfish in nature. Wouldn't Saddam still have WND if not for the pride and strength of our armed services and the weapons manufacturers, energy industry, and other geopolitical factors?

Fwiw, they're probably right. Maybe we will see more startups enter into this ripe "opportunity" to open the gates of hell and unleash the forces of greed and meyham.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#30

Post by lordnacho »

I'm not sure about that "Devsumer" section. IFTTT / Zapier and those are not replacing Accenture as far as I can tell.

The thing that makes Accenture a viable business is they can sell large projects to large entities. Things that people generally do not reckon they can fix on their own, like government health websites. There's no way to knit that together with just some common APIs. Yes, ironically Accenture can't either, but the point is they make money on convincing people they can.

The thing about people getting more dev-savvy I don't buy either. Yes, people can glue a few bits together now, but most people still suck at anything beyond simple automation. If you want evidence of this, look at Excel based jobs. Pretty much all of them can be automated in Excel itself, and every time someone tries it, they create an awful mess.

So yeah we'll now have a world of little Rube Goldberg machines of everyone's making, but I don't see them replacing any kind of large scale project. They can't really do it technically, and they don't seem like they will replace the incumbent salespeople either.

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