2023: Truth is Sometimes Stranger Than Prediction

How Did We Do on Our 2023 Predictions That We Made in 2022?

December 21, 2023 by Clint Chao, Moment Ventures

Well that was quite a year. You couldn’t have made up more interesting things than what we just went through in 2023!

But as some of you know, our team at Moment Ventures holds a fun predictions contest each year, where we each make 3–4 predictions for the upcoming year that are fun and bold (and often completely wrong). We’re encouraged to go out on a limb, and we’re allowed to make predictions in just about any category (tech, economy, politics, world affairs, society, etc), so long as it is reasonably measurable by the time we meet the following year. But it’s all in fun, and we make these guesses a bit off the cuff, so sometimes they are pretty crazy!

In past years, we’ve made some fun ones, some quite prescient. Here are a few:

• 2017: Fully autonomous taxi available in the Bay Area
• 2018: Softbank Vision Fund II will have a dramatic change in strategy
• 2019: A new virus pandemic will occur in 2020 (!!!)
• 2020: Trump TV or streaming show will air to surprising ratings
• 2021: There will be a land war on the European continent in 2022 (!!!)

So How Did We Do in ‘22?

Last November 2022, we made our predictions for 2023, and we just reviewed them yesterday. Well, after this past year’s real life occurrences, I think it’s safe to say that sometimes truth is stranger than prediction, as we were less successful this time around. But they were pretty interesting predictions nonetheless, and perhaps a year or two early on some!

So here were our 2023 predictions from November 2022 — how’d we do?

1. Biggest travel year ever in the history of the world ($ spend)
2. Arsenal will win the premier league and make it through group stage of the champions league at this time next year
3. China and US will collaborate on a major international crisis in 2023
4. Putin no longer leader of Russia
5. Stripe will go public by this time in 2023
6. We will have a 100%-fabricated (completely AI) household super-celebrity
7. Someone will die from wearing a VR headset / playing in the metaverse
8. There will be more than 10k Cybertrucks in production
9. AI will generate a groundbreaking treatment for a human disease in 2023
10. Major innovation in alternative energy — home energy drops to $2 / kWh
11. Major lawsuit negatively impacts the generative AI market
12. 30-year fixed mortgage rates will hit 10% in 2023
13. A tactical nuke will be launched by this time in 2023 (non-test)
14. SpaceX will be weaponized in a political fashion
15. Commodity prices will drastically decrease to solve inflation
16. China makes a quick invasion of Taiwan (defined as boots on the ground)
17. Discovery of monumental natural fungus or bacteria to cure a human disease (FDA trials start)
18. Major new kitchen gadget will emerge (one of us will have purchased)
19. A basket of fast food stocks will be up 30% (Yum, McDonald’s, Krispy Kreme)
20. A Western European country will have a declared major famine / food crisis (as defined by require UN aid)

This year, we had our team members score each prediction on a scale of 1–10 based on accuracy, with a default to 0 if you were just plain wrong and 10 if you were dead-on right. Congrats to my partner Ammar Hanafi for taking home the top score this year for his 4 mostly accurate predictions (1–4 above), while the rest of us whiffed pretty bad (but we’ll see in a year!)

On to 2024

We also just completed our next-year predictions for 2024. This time, we also added a special U.S. Elections prediction, where each person will guess the 2 primary presidential candidates and the actual winner, with higher points allocated to anyone not named Trump or Biden. We’ll store this list away and not look at it again until we meet in December of 2024 (that’s probably the most fun, as we forget what we predicted, and it’s quite entertaining to see what we guessed a year later!), and then we’ll share the with all of you then.

Happy New Year to you all! And we wish that some of our predictions will not come true, as they are quite dark! See you next year!

Clint Chao is a General Partner at Moment Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, CA. You can reach/follow him on LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter.