Eight Investment Waves Seen by VCs in 2021

Investment waves VCs saw in pandemic-shadowed 2021 1. Clubhouse was the hottest thing early in the year and had disappeared from view by year-end. (But with AirPods, the audio economy and audio-based knowledge sharing keep gaining strength.) 2. Electric vehicles: as major carmakers prepare to end combustion-engine cars by 2035/2040, EVs were expected to boom further in 2021. Taiwanese manufacturers and VCs are positioning themselves too. 3. AI plus robotics will reshape the world. (To Elon, a Tesla EV is also AI plus a type of robot.) 4. Space travel and low-Earth-orbit satellites: after decades of quiet, imagination about space reignited in 2021. Bezos and Richard Branson completed their own trips; Starlink filled low Earth orbit with satellites, creating new opportunities. 5. Facebook is driving the metaverse, with NVIDIA helping. Thirty years of screen-based internet may give way to another kind of space. (Even Marvel expanded its multiverse/time perspective in 2021: Loki, WandaVision, Spider-Man 3, and Doctor Strange 2.) 6. Blockchain-based Web3 complements the metaverse. The first internet generation offered reading; the second added writing, interaction, and social activity. The third concerns storing and transferring digital value and assets through decentralized architecture. Together with point five’s metaverse, it creates a fuller narrative and vision. 7. The pandemic keeps biotechnology in focus, while gene editing advances rapidly. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized gene-editing technology. 8. SaaS: software is still eating the world. Overshadowed by larger themes, it nevertheless keeps advancing digital transformation across industries. In this tenfold-speed era, humanity will accelerate over the next ten years, while VC continues helping the world change. Add your thoughts~