Welcome to In the Trenches. It’s great to have over 10,000 of you here! My goal with this newsletter is to be all signal and no noise. To that end, make sure you let me know each week how you liked the content.

Happy New Year!

As the year ended, I took a break from writing for ~6 weeks. I'm excited to get back into it in 2024 and reconnect with many of you - I can't promise that I'll be writing weekly, but I can promise that I enter your inbox, I'll always try to share insights that pushes your thinking forward.

To that end, I wanted to kick off this year's newsletter with a fun predictions exercise I do every year. At the beginning of the year, I like to make a list of ~25 predictions. These predictions span across markets, industries and geographies. Here are my predictions for this year:

1. Cancel culture gets canceled
2. Ozempic (GLP-1) is bigger than AI
3. Private credit is a headfake
4. Another Tier 1 Investor blows up
5. S&P 500 sees a +15% gain
6. TikTok finally gets banned in the US
7. Longevity products go mainstream
8. Crypto begins a new bull market
9. Terminal multiples for software businesses double
10. Software moats erode with AI
11. Valuation dispersion widens
12. A new generational social media product is born
13. India has a blockbuster startup IPO
14. US IPO market reopens; M&A stalls with regulation
15. Small cap tech IPOs will make a come back
16. Take private accelerate in SaaS via PE
17. AI deflates healthcare
18. SMB M&A arbitrage goes away
19. Digital detoxes go mainstream
20. Patience reemerges as a virtue
21. Hubris decreases, humility increases
22. Logic and reason return to all walks of life - business, politics, etc.
23. Our standards increase
24. The world becomes a better place to live
25. The innovation train continues to roll

Some accurate predictions from my 2023 list:

• Tier 1 investor blew up
• Inflation stabilized by end of year
• Deepfakes got scary good
• More CEOs went direct / bypassed legacy media
• Nationalism increased at the individual level

Some big misses from that same list:

• TikTok wasn’t banned in the US
• US govt budget still a ways to go before > 50% of GDP
• PE scooped up a lot of Saas, but not quite 30%
• Crypto did not go down 40%
• Interest rates may not stay high (+5%) for next 3 years

Let’s see what 2024 has in store.

Talk soon,

Romeen

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