AVC | What Happened In 2024
I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending (What Happened) and one looking forward to the year ahead (What Will Happen). This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow.
Some years are marked by one big thing that overshadows everything else. In tech, startups, and VC, 2024 was one of those years. The one big thing was Silicon Valley's hostile takeover of the federal government, via an infiltration of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, and Trump's subsequent thrashing of Joe Biden's "establishment" government in the November election.
The backdrop for this takeover is the rapid advancement of technologies over the last decade that will reshape our society and the establishment government's hostility toward and fear of them. Silicon Valley tried for much of the last decade to educate, communicate, and help the establishment "get there" on the innovation economy and ultimately was shut out and shut down. It was frustrating. Very frustrating. That frustration resulted in a full-on endorsement of the "blow it all up" mentality behind the MAGA movement.
Trump/MAGA and Silicon Valley make for strange bedfellows, but they are now very much in bed together and their partnership may bring massive changes to the US and the world. Innovation exists all over the world, but the center of gravity in the innovation economy remains in the US and it is centered in Silicon Valley. What happens in the US over the next four years will shape the innovation economy all over the world.
