Three interrelated macro themes dominated this year in tech: the breakout of crypto, beginning of the end of white male dominance, and the backlash against tech
As has become my practice, I celebrate the end of a year and the start of a new one here at AVC with back to back posts focusing …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is AVC's annual year-end theme-setting post, part of a series that stretches back at least to its look at 2014's major technology trends — a ritual where the blog converts a year of observations into a small number of macro claims for its investor and founder audience.
What makes the 2017 edition notable in hindsight is how two of its three themes — the backlash against tech and the erosion of white male dominance — read as early warnings: the following year's coverage records antitrust investigations, consumer protests against big companies, and tough IPOs, while the decade-end reckoning in the 2010s takeaways treats the era's assumptions, like capital as a moat, as having failed.
First-order effects
- Crypto's breakout moves it from fringe bet to a category the venture community AVC addresses must hold a position on, raising the cost of sitting out for funds and founders without exposure.
- Naming the backlash and the decline of white male dominance as dominant themes hands critics, employees, and regulators a widely-read framing for pressures the industry was already facing.
Second-order effects
- Competing outlets' year-end roundups — such as Vox's 2019 list marking antitrust investigations and consumer protests — institutionalize the same scorecard, turning one blogger's themes into a shared industry narrative that companies must answer to.
- A mainstreamed crypto thesis pulls adjacent capital and talent toward token-based projects, pressuring traditional equity-stage investors to defend their model just as the decade-end coverage declares capital-as-a-moat dead.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual retrospectives shift from celebrating breakout categories to auditing the industry's externalities — a self-correcting record that preceded both the 2019 regulatory turn and the structural reassessment of how tech value is created.
- Sustained backlash plus eroding demographic dominance points toward an industry whose legitimacy, hiring pool, and funding norms are all contested at once — the conditions under which regulation becomes the default constraint on platform growth rather than the exception.
The trend: Tech's annual theme-setting has evolved from cataloguing breakout categories into auditing the industry's costs — speculative manias, homogeneity, and eroding public trust — with each year's list feeding the next year's reckoning.