How will this impact Indian Startups/Jobs in 2024?
My first thought is that, inflation adjusted returns will soon become lucrative for investors as some amount of capital returns to VC Funds.
Any other thoughts/differing PoVs?
While there are lot of VCs coming out with their ‘expert’ outlook on 2024, let’s be real to share our own predictions. Idea is to share and learn and not just mudsling.
Let me go first with few of my own
Neobanking will go belly up - it’s really hard to make money in just Savings account led neobanking I believe. With lending increasingly difficult, I think we will see likes of Jupiter going belly up
Gold mine of climate tech - climate tech will become more mainstream stream (similar to content and community in 2021, D2C in 2022 and SaaS in 2023)
What are yours?
Consumer-tech will be hot once again. Many AI-focused startup’s will pop up in this space. Larger players (like Meta, Amazon, AirBnB, Netflix) will go on an M&A spree acquiring companies for their tech. Not sure if this will play out in India.
In India, any consumer/D2C idea will still remain hot as VCs realise that safest way to make money in India is from consumer. However, platform companies which are capex heavy like q-commerce will not be hot.
Fintech (regulations) and ed-tech ( hard to keep selling dreams of cracking competitive exams) will slow down.
Building SaaS in India and selling to the US will get decimated.
Lots of PE activity that will lead to traditional family businesses/manufacturing firms modernising (maybe not 2024 but next 5 years).
Smaller VCs will pop up who will bet on founders with unconventional backgrounds (non-IIT/IIM) and moonshot ideas such as climate tech.
Biggest hit will be taken by your traditional early-stage VC firms who were thesis driven and were backing non-risky traditional founders. You can already see this playing out. These VCs nowadays only fund founders with 5+ years of industry experience which shows a lack of risk appetite.
Stagnation of hiring. AI tools adoption at org level.
Dollars raised by startups will either go to the mega cloud provider, for ads and LLM model.
More closures…
My first thought is that, inflation adjusted returns will soon become lucrative for investors as some amount of capital returns to VC Funds.
Any other thoughts/differing PoVs?
This is just a prediction based on what I've been observing recently. Founder is publishing a lot of self ego boosting articles and aggressively hiring currently.
This has been going on for quite some time and they recently did some lay...