Our review of 2024 and what 2025 holds for the world and the Tech industry. From geopolitical dynamics to M&A and IPOs, regulation, crypto winters and summers, to inflation and DOGE and many other things.

Navigation:

1. Intro (01:34 )


2. Review of 2024


3. What’s next, 2025?


4. Conclusion

Our co-hosts:

• Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt


• Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro

Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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Bertrand Schmitt

Welcome to Tech DECIPHERED Episode 61. It’s at this time of the year where we look back what happened in the past year in 2024 in tech, as well as trying to put some thoughts into what 2025 might look like, what might be the next big things happening in global tech industry. Let’s start with our review of 2024.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro

It’s been an interesting year. A year of elections around the world, so maybe we start at that level. The landscape geopolitically has become very interesting. I’d seen some chart that shows the most gain on the right ever globally across elections. I think there’s some message going on that people are really not happy about, status quo. Obviously, in the US, Donald Trump got elected, so he will again be the President of the United States next year or starting next year.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro

In Europe, we’ve had a lot of countries that went to the right. Austria, I believe the right wing party won. A lot of interesting and somehow shocking results in some cases with very populist views, for example, countries like my own Portugal, and all around that. Very significant geopolitical transition where it seems like populism is here to stay.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro

There are significant concerns around the world around immigration. There are significant concerns around the world around security. There are significant concerns around the world around economic growth. I think the elections that we saw this year, for the most, are reflecting upon the discontent of citizens across the world, of which the US is just but an example.

Bertrand Schmitt

Yes. Actually, I’m not sure anymore about that when we call populism, one side or the other, what it really means at some point, it doesn’t sit right to me anymore. I think 10 years ago, maybe I had some concept about what it means. But today, I’m not really clear, to be frank, because when you see Trump and his alliance with people like Elon Musk or JFK, it’s not clear they are populist at all. The same in Europe. I’m not really clear, what is true is for sure more right wing, moving away from left or centre.

Bertrand Schmitt

Yeah, this will have a significant impact on a lot of topics, and we’ll go through that. France also went more right wing, at least in term of parliament. Germany, we will see next year, actually. They’re preparing for election, the government in Germany. I think it was the day or the next day after the result of the US election, the government imploded. There are new elections scheduled for early next year. It looks like it will also go more right wing. It will make certainly for an interesting change of policies and politics.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro

Indeed, all of all, I think a lot of renewed discussion around what is the role of countries, governments, different counties, provinces, states in the case of the US, local government, is the system fully broken or not? A lot of debate around precisely the incentives that people have to vote for a party versus another and what are the key issues that are on their mind. But as I mentioned, I feel it’s clear that it’s the economy, stupid back through the day, and security have been effectively the key considerations for this year.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro

In terms of the overall year, it was a year that was supposed to somehow be really awful. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a year that was awful. Stock markets have gone up, in particular in the US, driven mostly by technology, The Fed rates started to go down, so it seems like inflation now is more and more under control. We see a lot of movement around, in particular, the technology stack of the fence that has taken us to the next level. There’s a lot of bright spots. I think we had anticipated maybe a very bleak 2024. It certainly was not in terms of equities, both on the public markets, but also on the private market side of the fence, including venture capital.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro

We’ll come back to that later. I think there is somehow certainly on the private markets a huge impact of AI. AI is distorting the numbers. The markets are still a bit shaky, but AI and AI investment has changed how the markets look certainly for venture capital. We’ll come back to that later. But basically, a year that was bad, and well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t bad.

Bertrand Schmitt

I would mostly agree with you, Nuno. Maybe I would qualify that it’s certainly true in the US. China also in terms of stock market, it did well thanks to a big stimulus. It’s not clear how long it stays that way, but it looks like they plan to keep doing more stimulus. The European markets were pretty bad, or at least it was like zero or slightly negative. US, for sure, doing very well. Maybe also the European startups, at least with the ones in AI,