It’s hard to discern whether our community dislikes Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Elon Musk more. A majority of you expressed a lack of confidence in both Presidents Trump (56% no confidence) and Biden (51%) or the 81% who believe Elon Musk has undue influence on American domestic and foreign policy. The strongest commentary focused on Elon declaring “Musk World is dangerous to the Globe” to the pithy “He may electrocute our democracy.”
A year ago some wag quoted the Beatles "I’ve got to admit it; it‘s getting better, a little better all the time (can't get much worse).” The same respondent updated with “the economy got better and better, but I’m not sure our nation will survive long enough for me to enjoy it!” Whether this is prompted by Trump, Musk, or industry fears we’ll hope to learn in next year’s survey. Check out the complete results, engaging opinion, and compare it to last year by clicking here.
Lest you think we are all haters and malcontents we received this lovely appeal concerning the wildfires in California “The venture community has banded into action. Contribute to The LA Tech Community Cares Fund.” For the 40% of our respondents who earned more in 2024 than the prior year and the 65% of us who expect to be enriched even more this year - dig deep.
Our17th Annual Semaphore Confidence Survey presents largely confirming opinions of our industry and its challenges. Several overriding observations deserve note. First, women respondents increased to 28%, albeit more modestly than the doubling of last year to 25%. Total participation was down from a year ago reverting to participation levels of nearly every other prior survey (910 individual responses). Artificial Intelligence is anticipated to capture the largest investment market share in 2025 in concert with your incorrect prediction that it would be #1 in 2024. AI ended up #4 in actual self-reported deal effort (wonder how ChatGPT would craft this miss). Surprisingly, a huge minority of you wish to end the hegemony of Amazon, Meta and Alphabet as support to break-up those titans rose from 28% to 48%. If the break-up were to reach Congress or the Supreme Court, only 8% of us have confidence in either institution, a number that pales against the 78% confidence our respondents have in themselves.
Your commentary remained enlightening and entertaining – thoughtful to witty. Please conduct your own review and analysis of our colleagues’ opinions. Click here for the full survey results and a representative sampling of commentary on matters of the industry, race, carried interest, sexual harassment, breaking up Big Tech, and Elon!