Hi, my name is Christian.

Here are a few things that I believe we could see happen across technology and the broader business market in 2023. To be clear, I’m not making any investing advice! I’m just having some fun thinking about the coming year.

Equity markets bottom out: I believe that the public stock market still has more downside baked in, but I also think that we’ll see the bottom and a turn in 2023. As central banks begin to level out interest rate hikes and inflation subsides, the market will rally as it looks around the corner to slightly easier monetary times. When this happens is actually anyone’s guess, but I’m going to place my bet that it happens in 2023.

To put a metric on this, I believe that in 2023, $VOO will hit a lower mark than it’s current price ($351.54), but it will also end the year at least 10% higher than where it is today.

Seed Stage Flourishes, Growth Stage Struggles: This is a dual prediction. Many startups that raised growth rounds in 2019/2020 at sky high valuations will be hitting the end of their runway, and will struggle to raise new rounds because restructuring their cap tables will be too painful. We’ll see some blowups, some mergers and some fire sales as a result.

Simultaneously, a good number of recently freed tech employees will form new startups and raise Seed rounds. I believe that we’ll see a few generational companies founded and launched in 2023. I’m very excited about new company formation this year.

Tech Take-Privates Abound: As public tech stocks continue their trip to the woodshed, large strategic PE firms like Thoma Bravo and Vista will start taking a number of mid-sized technology businesses private. There’s been a sector-wide pullback in investment in technology companies, and so a number of healthy companies with strong fundamentals will be oversold. Take-private firms will capitalize on a number of opportunities as a result.

Crypto prices flatline, but the ecosystem grows: As it relates to the financial market side of the sector, I don’t think we’ll see this crypto winter end in 2023. We’re unlikely to see movement in token prices while public equities are still declining: there’s not going to be a lot of excess cash around to put into crypto speculation, so even assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum will be relatively flat in terms of price by the end of 2023. I say relatively, because I would consider a 10-25% swing relatively flat for those assets. That’s where I think we’ll be in the end of 2023.

I do think that we’ll continue to see the developer ecosystem evolve and progress. I don’t think that NFTs were the killer app that the community was looking for, but something will emerge, and maybe that will happen in 2023.

The Generative AI bubble Commences: ChatGPT. I haven’t seen the tech community so excited since the early days of social media and the iPhone.

ChatGPT has captured the imaginations of the tech community, press, talk show hosts, business people, families at holiday dinners. My mother asked me about it over the holidays. Generative AI startups are going to get a slew of investment and attention. It’s well deserved, because this is exciting technology. However, as new technologies go, it’s going to get ahead of its skis in 2023 as enterprising Founders promise the world and the tech struggles to meet expectations for business applications in the short term.

TikTok spins out, Vine relaunches: Ok, perhaps this is in the geopolitics arena, but I think that Bytedance will spin out the US TikTok business after a full ban looks imminent. Bi-partisan political momentum seems to be swinging in this direction, so a spinout seems like the end state for this issue. I don’t think moving the data to the U.S. will suffice at this point.

I also think that Twitter will relaunch Vine in an effort to provide a new alternative to Tiktok that is natively focused on short form video. Because Twitter will have a tight integration with the app to provide distribution and user networks, it will do better than most expect as some key creators take a bet that it will have legs because of the advantage in distribution.

That’s what I’ve got for 2023.