It’s going to be A Week
And: My favorite Fred Wilson prediction for 2025
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
It’s Trump’s inauguration today. That means the starting gun for various day-one actions that the former POTUS promised. Dozens of executive orders are expected. What is on the table? Trump has promised, variously, to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” end birthright citizenship, end the Ukraine war, and lots more to boot.
Here’s hoping that some companies file to go public, a new AI model or two drops, and there’s some goddamn M&A. Else we’re going to be stuck masticating on Trump EOs viz the tech industry until our teeth hurt. Regardless, let’s get to work:
📈 Trending Up: Sen. Tom Cotton? … TikTok? … SEO … AI hype control … Elon mildly criticizing China … Indian sugar exports … realpolitik … the Taiwanese drone industry …
📉 Trending Down: Honesty? … Fox News’ average tenure … press freedom … Paytm’s losses … interest rate expectations, again ..
Well, this is gross
Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove reports:
A group of business execs accompanying a fake Christian to church to kiss ass curry favor with his incoming administration? A perfect encapsulation of the awful hybridization of performative Christianity, amoral politicians, and supine business leaders that we often see in American life?
The only thing that your once-Lutheran scribe can summon is this Matthew 21:12-14 (NKJV):
Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’ ”
My favorite Fred Wilson prediction for 2025
There are a few VCs I read because I find them fun. Some who are friends or close to it. And then there are VCs I read because they tend to have a pretty good pulse on the future. Fred Wilson of USV is one such investor.
He’s expecting a big year in crypto. But apart from his blockchains enthusiasm, Wilson had a prediction that I think won’t even take until the middle of the year to come true:
2/ Waymo will surpass Uber in rides taken in San Franciso and Los Angeles by the end of 2025.
Hard agree there, Freddy.
You can laugh
Headline of the Day: ‘Horrible look’: Crypto lobby reels from Trump’s ‘memecoin’ (Politico)
Quote of the Day:
Coffeezilla: I spent years of my life trying to tell people to do the right thing: Don't take advantage of your followers; don't scam people; don't grift. Otherwise, you're not going to get anywhere in life. You're not going to get to the highest office of the land. And if you do it too much, law enforcement might come after you.
Now the guy doing it appoints the law enforcement!
Meme of the Day (via /r/CryptoCurrency):
Lol. Lmao, even
Just as the crypto industry was poised to take a victory lap after crushing its regulatory rivals in the past election, incoming President Donald Trump managed to crash a pie directly into the face of his supporters in the form of not one, but two shitcoins.
A shitcoin — alternatively, a memecoin — is a crypto token that is not supposed to have utility-value, but instead trades on vibes. Interest. Memes. Naked greed. Whatever you want to call it.
Shitcoins come in infinite varieties. One or two have even shown staying power. The other rest go the way of the buffalo, sometimes overnight. But what shitcoins are good at is not accreting long-term value. No, shitcoins are great for pumping and dumping. To wit, if a token is bald-faced about its lack of utility, the only reason for its (potential) price ascent is vibes, momentum, or astroturfed hype. So long as you can get those going, it can go up because it goes up.
Enter $TRUMP and $MELANIA. Trump’s first shitcoin was named after himself, and was set up to enrich himself and his companies. Issued in a manner that greatly conserves their potential value to Trump and family, the coins were an incredibly naked value grab. But did their tokenomics matter? Nope. Because we are not talking about a serious asset; we’re instead discussing something that is inherently supposed to be silly.
So, no harm no foul? The President gets to make jokes?
I think a lot of people who have their wagons hitched to Trump’s own are biting their tongue this morning. Crypto folks want to be taken seriously. Stablecoins were about to have a crushing year. Bitcoin is over $100,000. And all the market can talk about now is the fact that the incoming POTUS is grifting his supporters using blockchain tech.
Sure, it pumped Solana, but it’s also incredible to see the incoming President (I am writing this to you pre-inauguration) start to lever a supporter industry for personal gain before even getting back to work.
I think it’s clear why Trump popped a 180 and went back on his prior stance that crypto was air. He learned that by saying “air is great” he could attract a simply enormous amount of financial support for his campaign. And once he learned that you can sell air, well, he was all-in.
The fact that Trump and Melania are doing shitcoins means (I believe) there are now no market rules regarding securitization on the blockchain. Nothing is a security, because if anything is, Trump just committed securities fraud? IANAL, but Lord above.
Anyway, expect a lot more of this in the coming four years
It’s going to be A Week
Tech news is all Trump today. I suspect you are already a little tired of the monotheme. But if there’s one thing that the next POTUS has been great at his entire life, it’s generating and capturing attention. Hence the present news cycle(s).
I think the best indicator of how wild the next two years will be — midterm elections tend to swing against incumbents — is the current TikTok mess. To summarize:
Trump wanted to ban TikTok during his first administration.
Later, during the Biden years, Congress passed a bill that would force TikTok to divest or sell.
After realizing that his material did well on TikTok, and that he could juice the issue for votes (and donations), Trump flip-flopped and argued against banning the social app.
After a legal scrap, TikTok lost, and started to go dark just as the American government was set to change out one set of leaders for another.
The Biden admin lost its nerve at the last moment, while Trump claimed that he was now in charge of the situation.
After promising that service providers wouldn’t get in trouble for breaking the law and replatforming TikTok, it came back online (at least partially).
At the same time, you have people like China-hawk Senator Tom Cotton pointing out that law still matters:
“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it. Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posed to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok.”
So, now what? Trump has immunity for official acts per the Supreme Court. So, can he just not follow the law? I don’t know! You don’t know! No one knows! But so much for rule of law and market consistency. At least if you are one of the President’s pet issues to the good. Else, get stuffed.
Next week is probably going to be A Week as well. And the one after.
Worry not. Cautious Optimism will be here to point out the good news amidst the chaos. And we’ll give credit where it’s due. Senator Cotton is as much my favorite senator as he is my favorite pop star. But he’s right here, so he gets two points.
Buckle up.