The next big thing in 2025 will be...

For the 5th year in a row, 50 of technology's top thinkers weigh in on the year ahead.

Welcome to issue #57 of next big thing.

It’s that time of the year again! For those of you interested in looking back, here’s the archive of these end-of-year posts from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021. And here’s my post from last week reflecting on the 2024 predictions.

2024 has been a strong year for investors and an exciting year for technology. Public markets have had a great year (Nasdaq +33%, S&P +25%, Dow +13% for the year). Technology has had a transformational year, with significant advancements in AI, robotics, space, biology, healthcare, carbon capture, and quantum computing. So what does 2025 have in store for us? Enjoy reading these thoughts from some of tech’s best, would love your own in the comments, and happy holidays!

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… AI agents.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the rise of the agentic app.

-Nikesh Arora, Chairman & CEO at Palo Alto Networks

The next big thing in 2025 will be a turning point when the tools and systems for building AI agents become more sophisticated. This will make it possible for semi-independent AI agents to become genuinely useful, particularly when organizations deploy them for internal use cases.

-Gokul Rajaram, Co-Founder & General Partner at Marathon

The next big thing in 2025 will be the beginning of a battle between AI agent startups and established SaaS players. Agent startups, after proving initial value with narrow use cases, will be forced to expand into traditional SaaS territory - building workflow tools and moving deeper into systems of record to capture more customer value and prevent churn. Meanwhile, SaaS platforms will aggressively integrate their own agent capabilities, leveraging their existing customer relationships and data. The key tension: agents need to get sticky, while SaaS needs to stay competitive. Expect M&A activity as both sides race to build complete solutions.

-Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital

The next big thing in 2025 will be web usage shifting from humans to agents. This will be so much more than “book my flight for me” — agents will automate the billions of repetitive clicks on the internet today.

-Jamie Cuffe, Founder at New Company

The next big thing in 2025 will be the widespread adoption of AI agents that can autonomously handle complex, multi-step tasks - from scheduling your entire vacation to managing your small business operations - while being fully aligned with individual users' preferences and values. This shift will mark the beginning of truly personalized AI assistance that goes far beyond today's basic chatbots and virtual assistants.

-Claude 3.5 Sonnet

… AI interfaces.

The next big thing in 2025 will be AI moving from assistants to collaborators.

-Jungwon Byun, Co-Founder & COO at Elicit

The next big thing in 2025 will be a Cambrian explosion of voice AI applications. Latency on inference, latency on networking, and more advanced turn detection / background noise detection / etc will lead to truly human-like experiences with software. As we “pass the Turing test” on voice AI applications we’ll see an explosion of building in this category.

-Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter Capital

The next big thing in 2025 will be computer use deployed everywhere. With Claude and MCP providing a useful protocol, computers will finally leverage the integrations and better reasoning models to make web agents a reality.

-Nikunj Kothari, Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures

The next big thing in 2025 will be new user interfaces for AI that elevate humans to manage work rather than interact directly with chat (2023) or copilots (2024). For example, AI now generates millions of lines of code so we’ll need new ways to review orders of magnitude more code than ever before.

-Jamie Cuffe, Founder at New Company

… AI applications.

The next big thing in 2025 will continue to be the evolution of AI at the application layer. AI applications will continue to advance and be able to create significant value across industries, domains, and modalities

-Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark

The next big thing in 2025 will be memory. Context from our past actions will help create the personalized applications we’ve all been hoping for while agents with memory will lead to an inflection in enterprise adoption.

-Shravan Narayen, Partner at IVP

The next big thing in 2025 will be verticalized product offerings with AI at their heart that take on boring old industries with enormous TAM. What SaaS was to On-Prem, this new business archetype will be to SaaS!

-Anand Chandrasekaran, Founder & President at Crescendo and Managing Partner at Celesta Capital

The next big thing in 2025 will be in the world of artificial intelligence, where it's going to be cool to be a GPT wrapper again. Consumers and businesses both need help figuring out how best to use already very powerful language models so we're going to see a bunch of applications crop up that help people get the most out of these models. Startups will build sales motions, integrations, customer know-how, etc and won't need some huge technological moat to justify their existence. Of course no one will want to call their company a "wrapper." Think more "GPT refiner." These companies will get data particular to their use-case, do some human reinforcement learning, and deliver an easy-to-use product that leads the horse to water instead of an intimidating empty text box.

-Eric Newcomer, Founder/Writer at Newcomer

… consumer AI.

The next big thing in 2025 will be consumer! AI is great at chatting, making pictures, and videos, which has product-market fit with consumer. We will see brand new consumer social apps, novel forms of interactive media, chat based otome games, fresh takes on searching & synthesizing information, ambient memory capture, and fun messaging apps with generative UI.

-Jess Lee, Partner at Sequoia Capital

The next big thing in 2025 will be AI-driven tooling cracking social networking and online fun in a new way, with winners scaling faster than the fastest mobile breakouts, and with novel interfaces that aren’t chatbots.

-Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV

… AI-generated content.

The next big thing in 2025 will be commoditized AI content creation.

-Ali Debow, Co-Founder & CEO at swsh

The next big thing in 2025 will be generative video eating consumer attention online.

-Kanyi Maqubela, Co-Founder & General Partner at Kindred Ventures

The next big thing in 2025 will be video generation models. Video is the ultimate form of creative expression and how we produce it will be fundamentally transformed as a result of next generation models.

-Damir Becirovic, Partner at Index Ventures

… real-time AI.

The next big thing in 2025 will be real-time AI. As t(inference) goes to zero it unlocks new applications, and Google just fired the starter pistol with the release of Flash. We’re in the “punch card” era of AI - you submit your punch cards and it thinks for a while and then gives you an answer. The next big thing is instant computation which is what we expect of every other modern computing system.

-Anish Acharya, General Partner at a16z

… AI for the mainstream.

The next big thing in 2025 will be AI for the mainstream rather than for the tech-progressive. The vast majority of people don't care about model benchmarks, they care about relevant use cases that improve their lives. The best AI products will be the ones that real people use.

-Adeel Khan, Founder & CEO at MagicSchool

The next big thing in 2025 will be AI blending into tech stacks without being mentioned.

-Can Duruk, Co-Founder & CTO at Felt

The next big thing in 2025 will be top AI talent shifting from working in the companies pioneering the latest and greatest AI to taking leadership roles in the industries that will benefit most from AI. As LLMs and other generative AI models become increasingly open source and generally commoditized, the accrual of value will shift from those who make the AI to those who can make the most use of it. Certain industries where imagination and risk-taking can be most unleashed by AI will start to be reimagined by the top talent that can best apply these learnings and capabilities.

-Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, Design & Emerging Products at Adobe

… AI in our day-to-day lives.

The next big thing in ‘25 will be LLMs visibly entering the physical world. We’ll start seeing people talking to AI assistants on their AirPods on the subway, early hints of smart in-home consumer robotics, bedside AI assistants for patients and physicians in hospitals, receptionists supercharged with AI (only dealing with escalations), and more of our day-to-day content becoming generated by models.

-Tanay Tandon, CEO at Commure

The next big thing in 2025 will be ambient AI that seamlessly integrates into our daily routines—imagine everything from personalized healthcare nudges to real-time language translation woven into everyday devices. This invisible layer of intelligence will make us feel like we’re living in a world where technology quietly anticipates our needs, rather than demanding our attention.

-ChatGPT o1

… AI-native hardware.

The next big thing in 2025 will be AI hardware people love.

-Alexis Ohanian, Founder at Seven Seven Six

The next big thing in 2025 will be AI-native computers – Apple Intelligence's stumbles aren't just a failure of execution but a canary in the coal mine that retrofitting AI onto existing devices is not the way forward, and thus 2025 will see new hardware products gain PMF by optimizing for local inference, symbiotic AI interactions, and operating systems designed for models rather than humans, all before going mainstream in 2026.

-Sumeet Singh, Founder at Worldbuild

The next big thing in 2025 will be a new wearable format that allows us to interact with AI, which will start to emerge and gain real user interest and usage.

-Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV

… AI-native organizations.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the rise of "cognicos," companies with an AI-native cognition-driven stack of technologies, with data and compute at the center, and humans playing the unique role of stewards and orchestration designers and engineers as nodes. Until now, humans have been the reasoning layer of every organization. Sure, every company uses technology, but mostly for the purpose of driving productivity and analysis to help humans make decisions and take action. In contrast, the next-generation company will be run by a combination of inference engines (real-time computational reasoning running every function and driving actions across the business), leveraging a variety of pre-trained AI models and a large amount of deep and proprietary data at the center of the company. This core of data, models, and computational reasoning will all be surrounded by “nodes" – the modern version of every “function” of a company from HR to product to sales - which, together, compose the logic layer that performs every process and operation of an organization. Old companies were designed to help people work efficiently together. New companies will be designed for cognition - the way a brain works.

-Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, Design & Emerging Products at Adobe

… AI business models.

The next big thing in 2025 will be "Simulation as a Service" as a business model - where both consumers and businesses use AI models that understand their internal state (whether their psyche or operations) to find the optimal path to their goals. The models will be able to simulate decisions and conversations, measuring the result of each against specific reward functions, and optimizing strategies to minimize error rates. While initially constrained by LLM costs, as these drop, we'll be able to run countless simulations simultaneously - which will effectively enable “predicting the future.”

-Dara Ladjevardian, Co-Founder & CEO at Delphi

The next big thing in 2025 will be the rise of the best AI companies pivoting to outcome-based pricing models. We will witness these innovators reshaping traditional monetization models by tapping into labor budgets that are ten times larger than those of traditional software.

-Madhavan Ramanujam, Co-Founder & General Partner at 49 Palms Ventures

.. not AI!

The next big thing in 2025 will be a counter-movement to AI content overload, bringing focus back to human curation and authenticity. Infinite AI generated content is still in its "wow" and novelty phase. But anytime there is abundance of an asset, the pendulum swings to the other side, where people appreciate the scarce assets that come with quality, which in information's case, is trust. As trust becomes scarce, influence will concentrate among select curators and experts who can use AI to scale their validated perspectives while maintaining credibility. These curators will have unprecedented reach and impact, as they'll be able to maintain personal connections at scale through AI-enhanced interactions while preserving the authenticity that made people trust them in the first place.

-Dara Ladjevardian, Co-Founder & CEO at Delphi

The next big thing in 2025 will not be AI as the main character. Bets have been made, and there are many hot takes on commoditization in models. The physical infrastructure will be a really important conversation. Energy (very hard to come by), data centers (insane CapEx), and I believe as the Trump admin comes in, more thought will go into HOW we power AI and not on the outcomes of AI which has dominated all of 2024.

-Nichole Wischoff, Founder & General Partner at Wischoff Ventures

… AI, wrongly.

The next big thing in 2025 will be an acceleration of what already is, driving an ever-larger mass of capital into increasingly low returning AI and distributed computing opportunities, setting up for a difficult retrenchment in 2026.

-Compound248

… software development.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the "YouTube-ification" of software. Building software will become the next frontier of creative expression. Just as video production once seemed daunting, AI coding assistants are turning us all into software developers. Why only do a podcast when building a high quality, monetizable software product will be as simple as making a YouTube video?

-Jeff Morris Jr., Founder & Managing Partner at Chapter One

The next big thing in 2025 will be lots of new products coming from the falling barriers to software engineering. So far, most AI products were imagined by AI engineers and researchers - we’ve yet to fully see the creative output of non-AI builders using this general purpose technology. I think a blockbuster app will top iOS or similar charts that’s built by someone who can’t actually code.

-Nathan Benaich, Founder & General Partner at Air Street Capital

… small teams scaling growing companies.

The next big thing in 2025 will be startups of 10 people getting to $10M ARR in less than 18 months with less than $5M raised.

-Garry Tan, President & CEO at Y Combinator

… research-oriented founders.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the rise of research-oriented founders - and the reality of the growing pains that come along with this new class of creator. I see so many new venture firms pounce on researchers with millions of dollars and party rounds - which is exciting when you think about the sheer progress of technology and innovation around us, but less rosy when you think about the natural tensions between academia and blitzscaling success so rewarded in this industry. I expect next year to bring its fair share of success stories and new technical icons, but also some reality checks when it comes to starry-eyed founders clashing with their now impatient backers.

-Natasha Mascarenhas, Reporter at The Information

… product-oriented founders.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the return of the product oriented founder. The magic of AI technology that led to instant PMF for so many companies is starting to wane. What’s needed now is exceptional products that solve real problems — and the teams that can natively build them.

-Michael Mignano, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

… privacy.

The next big thing in 2025 will be a growing appreciation and desire for privacy.

-BoredElonMusk

… private internets.

The next big thing in 2025 will be hyper-curated "private internets" – think decentralized Reddit, where communities naturally form around human-verified content curation and where the "slop ratio" (AI-generated to human-created content) is kept intentionally near zero through specific product mechanisms (e.g., Worldcoin, attaching compute to real-world objects, human-taste-led curation of content vs. publishing, etc.).

-Sumeet Singh, Founder at Worldbuild

… crypto-fintech.

The next big thing in 2025 will be applications built on stablecoins. They (both b2b and b2c) will take off as the gateway to crypto utility as regulation in the category becomes clearer paving the path for more founders to build.

-Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV

The next big thing in 2025 will be the mainstream revival of crypto-fintech products that had come to life during the last crypto cycle – each cycle brings wider adoption despite the crashes, and with potential regulatory tailwinds from the White House, expect previously crushed ideas (stablecoin banking, fiat on-ramps, yield products) to come back to life (investors, be prepared to hear a lot of the same ideas from 2021).

-Sumeet Singh, Founder at Worldbuild

… in the real economy.

The next big thing in 2025 will be crypto, healthcare investments and AI & creative tooling. We’re already seeing a ton of investment in the latter two category but curiously the VC community seems to be sleeping on crypto’s resurgence since the crypto winter.

We’re also seeing a change of VC as an asset class — we’re experiencing a long overdue correction. Funds will focus less on overhead and more on what really matters: making great investments.

-Caroline Clark, Co-Founder & CEO at Arcade

The next big thing in 2025 will be entrepreneurs building in “impactful” sectors like healthcare, education, and small business. The new generation of founders grew up with climate change, income inequality, a recession, a pandemic, a broken healthcare system. As a result, they show a strong desire to build businesses that solve real-world problems. This means sectors that were once overlooked or deemed unattractive will get a look with fresh eyes.

-Rex Woodbury, Founder & Managing Partner at Daybreak

.. in learning.

The next big thing in 2025 will be learning experiences that grow with you. Instead of reading 400-page books or sitting in 20-hour courses whose static curriculum don't match your learning style, people will shift to personalized, interactive experiences that know how to keep you motivated and actually moving forward. The key shift is from passive consumption to active engagement where the content evolves with your understanding and needs.

-Dara Ladjevardian, Co-Founder & CEO at Delphi

… consumer healthcare.

The next big thing in 2025 will be in consumer healthcare. The improvement over the last few years in health data availability and portability have laid the groundwork for 2025 to be an empowering year for the healthcare consumer. Consumers distrust of the American healthcare system has surged and costs continue to spiral upwards.

This next year, consumers will have more control over their health data via initiatives such as individual access services (IAS). Further, self-insured employers, who now insure almost a third of Americans, are going to be even more attuned to their employees’ preferences, as regulation puts pressure on them to serve as fiduciaries to their members and health reimbursement accounts continue to gain steam.

-Vishal Lugani, Co-Founder & General Partner at Acrew Capital

… GLP-1s.

The next big thing in 2025 will be a second wind for GLP1 drugs. Already a blockbuster product in obesity and diabetes headed towards $50B of annual sales, this class of medicines will be further bolstered by new research findings. First off, there seems to be no limit to what diseases GLP1 biology is linked to as label expansion studies continue to create strong signal in everything from sleep apnea (now officially FDA approved) to chronic heart failure. On top of that, an entire generation of improved variants are making their way into late stage trials. This will be a drug class that large pharmas not named Lilly or Novo cannot afford to miss and we will continue to see outsized exit opportunities as companies in the industry posture for position.

-Nan Li, Founder & Managing Partner at Dimension

… in cannabis.

The next big thing in 2025 will be Hemp-based THC. The U.S. market for Delta-8 THC and other hemp-derived cannabinoids has increased a whopping 1,283% in just three years, growing from $200.5 million in sales in 2020 to nearly $2.8 billion in sales in 2023, according to analysis from Brightfield Group.

-Arfur Rock

… in robotics.

The next big thing in 2025 will be a step change in the world preparing for the arrival of fully general-purpose robots. Many people will experience a shift to “oh this is really happening isn’t it?”. Any industry built on physical labor will start to be reimagined, including those that have so far not even considered robots.

-Pete Florence, Co-Founder & CEO at Generalist AI

… in space.

The next big thing in 2025 will be regular landings on the moon of equipment to prepare for people shortly thereafter!

-Delian Asparouhov, Co-Founder at Varda Space and Partner at Founders Fund

… in defense.

The next big thing in 2025 will be a tidal wave of defense spending. This is a continuation of 2024 but will increase significantly in 2025.

-Harry Stebbings, Founder at 20VC

The next big thing in 2025 will be an acceleration of startup and funding activity in defense. This has been years in the making, of course, propelled by mega-trends like the acceleration of AI and the consumerization of warfare, but a lot of things will come together in 2025: a successful Anduril IPO, the rise of the Palantir/Anduril/OpenAI/SpaceX consortium as the new defense prime, a defense-friendly Trump administration, the need to replenish (and modernize) weapons and munitions post-Ukraine, and an increasing perception in the rest of the world that they should truly rely on themselves in a context where a more isolationist America may or may not come to the rescue.

-Matt Turck, Managing Director at FirstMark Capital

… in government.

The next big thing in 2025 will be a Twitter files for government. Tech will become very influential in this administration and there will be more big winners selling to government than there have been in the past.

-Erik Torenberg, Founder & CEO at Turpentine

… San Francisco.

The next big thing in 2025 will be San Francisco. SF is BACK BABY! Promising local election outcomes, a Mayor who wants to work with the private sector and tech again, IRL matters for communities and startups, abundance YIMBY mindset to kickstart building, YC/Ron Conway never gave up on the city, and so on. Yes, there are challenges - some of which will take several years to fully move on - but 2025 is the year the narrative starts turning. I used to worry it would take a kinetic crisis (eg earthquake) to unite us but a non-kinetic one (post COVID 'doom loop') inspired and united enough locals to fight again for the city we love. LFG.

-Hunter Walk, Co-Founder & Partner at Homebrew

… data centers.

The next big thing in 2025 will be Data Centers. Expect to see increased investments in data centers, cooling technology for data centers, and energy to run data centers. Eg. under-water data centers, diamond-cooling, nuclear renaissance.

-Sriram Krishnan, Co-Founder & General Partner at Kearny Jackson

… independent media.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the year independent media became mainstream media. The Trump campaign's reliance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, All-In, and the rest of the independent media ecosystem will convince marketers that they need to fully embrace an independent media strategy. That will help dump more professional money and mainstream enthusiasm into "independent" media. It will also mean that it will be the year blaming the "mainstream media" loses its coherence as the ill-defined independent media swamps traditional media in relevance and reach.

-Eric Newcomer, Founder/Writer at Newcomer

… IPOs, M&As, and liquidity.

The next big thing in 2025 will be both the tech M&A and IPO markets booming, as companies take advantage of a more receptive stock market and a more permissive FTC to deliver liquidity and exits to shareholders.

-Gokul Rajaram, Co-Founder & General Partner at Marathon

The next big thing in 2025 will be liquidity. With the new government being far more pro deregulation, we’ll see the IPO market and M&A come roaring back.

-Nikunj Kothari, Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures

The next big thing in 2025 will be the continued maturation of financial products for late stage, seemingly pre-IPO companies. “Will they go public or not?” will continue to be a debate, but firms will offer secondaries, private debt, partial buyouts and more. And with an ironic twist, you’ll start to see names of those firms like General Catalyst or A16Z floated more frequently to IPO themselves.

-Aashay Sanghvi, Partner at Haystack

… big tech earnings.

The next big thing in 2025 will be the acceleration of EPS and free cash flow/share at big tech (Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft).

If 2024 was a stabilization of revenues as customer confidence came back, 2025 and beyond could result in optimism for both US corporates and consumers. As consumer confidence returns with the prospect of a stable jobs market and increasing wages, consumer spending should be robust. Software spend should accelerate as corporates feel better about their prospects and spend budgets on areas outside of preparing their data estates for AI applications.

This should result in accelerating top lines are the largest mega caps - for example, Google search revenue should accelerate. This thinking is simply not captured in consensus.

My contrarian (and potentially controversial) prediction is that GPU/AI-driven capex will remain high BUT will come in lower than expectations - resulting in accelerating free cash flows at the mega caps. Combined with cost discipline, FCF / Share and EPS will likely accelerate over 2025 (and potentially 2026).

-Ram Parameswaran, Founder at Octahedron Capital

The next big thing in 2025 will be mainstream adoption of agents in large enterprise leading to increased earnings and quarterly beats, resulting in continued stock ATHs among hyperscalers.

-Chad Byers, Co-Founder & General Partner at Susa Ventures

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I started next big thing to share unfiltered thoughts. I’d love your feedback, questions, and comments!

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