One year ago I was starting a new job at Gawker, where I was going to write the Valleywag blog. That adventure was cut short when I ruptured disk while skiing, but not before I made a bunch of incredibly bad predictions for 2015, in an post headlined, Predictions For 2015: There Will Be Blood. I hate making predictions because I suck at it and my predictions are almost always wrong. Someone on Twitter just this week pointed out to me this article from 2010 where I predicted that a tech crash was imminent, in part because Facebook was then valued at a mind-blowing $65 billion. I don’t remember writing that article, but it occurs to me that I have now spent five years believing that the tech bubble is about to burst. Meanwhile, Facebook is now valued at just under $300 billion. I hate myself so much.
Since it’s New Year’s Day, and I’m bored, and maybe also because I grew up Catholic, I took a look back at my predictions from a year ago. Good grief. I said Uber would have a big IPO, that Jack Dorsey would be booted from Square, that Box would get acquired, and that Marissa Mayer would leave Yahoo. I said hackers would do something really serious, something way beyond Sony and possibly state-sponsored; so far, thank goodness, that’s not true. I said Andy Rubin would announce a new product.
On the other hand, I predicted that Dick Costolo would get booted from Twitter, which was not entirely wrong, because Dick is no longer at Twitter but I believe he left under his own steam rather than getting “booted.” I spent the summer working with Dick on Silicon Valley. He flew down to LA every week and worked as a consultant on the show. He’s a shockingly good guy, and it will be fun watching people in the real Silicon Valley try to guess which tidbits in the upcoming season came from him.
I predicted that Carly Fiorina would run for president, and that Larry Page would step aside at Google. I said that Apple Watch would be a dud. I also said Oculus Rift would suck too, which hasn’t happened yet.
My big prediction was that the tech bubble would pop, and we would see “paper fortunes wiped out overnight, (and) the smug bratty tech pricks going back to work as baristas.” Yes, some formerly high-flying companies have been crammed down, but from what I can tell here in my comfy office in a suburb of Boston, there isn’t much blood in the water.
This year I will not be making any predictions, except that my book, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, will be published in April, and that board members at HubSpot, who fired the company’s CMO and sanctioned the CEO and reported their activities to “appropriate legal authorities” for trying to obtain an advance copy of the manuscript, will enjoy it immensely.
The following is now my new theme song. I’m also going to name an award after Delbert McClinton. I’m calling it “The Full Delbert.” It’s an award for being completely, absolutely, ridiculously, dead wrong. I’m the first recipient.