Dec 22, 2025, 10:01 AM ETFireside Chat, Interview, Podcast

Predictions for 2026: Top Buy & Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win & NVIDIA’s Challenges

Four IPOs are expected to be backloaded in 2026, led by SpaceX going public first.
Canva is projected to be the second IPO, described as an unexpected market entry with strong fundamentals.
Databricks is anticipated to go public in the back half of the year, characterized as a necessary financial evolution ("Series M").
Anthropic is predicted to go public at the end of the year to solve capital needs without the immediate overhead of being public.
OpenAI is considered likely to delay its IPO until mid-2027 due to its current high burn rate.
Banking challenges exist regarding how to price and handle demand for companies valued at or exceeding $1 trillion.
A potential risk involves the sheer volume of shares available for trade ($950 billion+ lockup) compared to the new capital raised ($50 billion+), which could cause extreme volatility.

Founders of the Year:
- Dario Amodei (Anthropic) was selected for delivering the "product of the year" (Claude 3.5/3.7) and running a profitable, steady business.
- Gwyn Shotwell (SpaceX) was recognized for exceptional CEO navigation of geopolitical challenges and brand management alongside Elon Musk.
- Alex Wang (Lovable) was praised for delivering a 10-20x return to investors despite a risky video/social network model.
- Vlad Tenev (Robinhood) was highlighted for executing a "super playbook" of expanding from a single-product fintech app to a trusted multi-product ecosystem with nine products exceeding $100M revenue each.
Venture Capital Funds of the Year:
- Index Ventures won based on competent execution across multiple exits (Wiz, Figma, Revolut) using a traditional model perfected.
- Initialized Capital (Neo) was voted for "aesthetic" success, hustling into top deals like Cursor and CalSheet personally.
- Creandum was recognized as a top European fund, successfully scaling to dominate the region with major exits like Trade Republic and Lovable.
- Hummingbird Capital was noted as a standout seed fund, returning $800M on a $100M fund, primarily through early investments in Lovable and Kraken.
Corporate Investors:
- Google was recognized for a "circular investment" strategy holding double-digit stakes in SpaceX, Waymo, and Anthropic.
- Menlo Ventures received credit for exiting Chime and leading an $4B round for Anthropic.

No Ceiling on Valuations: Venture capital has reached a point where there is no cap on exit values, fundamentally changing investment math and allowing late-stage investors to compete with early ones.
Talent Wars: A shift in M&A strategy saw companies like Meta paying $100M for a single individual and Cognition buying Windsurf for $14B specifically to acquire the engineering team, treating the company itself as a husk.
AI Agent Capability: The utility of AI agents has expanded beyond coding to practical execution (e.g., 11 Labs voice cloning, Open Evidence for doctors), moving from "parroting" to genuine problem-solving.
Breakout Companies:
- Databricks: Identified as the company that best rode the AI wave, accelerating growth to 55% while managing cloud compute for AI models.
- 11 Labs: Achieved $400M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by offering "best-of-breed" voice solutions that replaced expensive, slow human workflows.
- Open Evidence: Scaled to 500,000 doctors by targeting a specific niche of academic research search for medical professionals.
- Lovable and Replit: While transformative for developers, they were deemed too early-stage to count as "world-changing" breakout products with B2B revenue yet.

Top Performers:
- A prediction was made that three of the following six B2B tech stocks will be in the top six performers: Palantir, Cloudflare, MongoDB, Shopify, CrowdStrike, and Snowflake.
- Salesforce is predicted to benefit significantly from "Agent Force" adoption, where customers pay for AI-driven automation that directly replaces headcount.
- Notion is singled out as the only B2B SaaS company successfully doubling its ARPU ($10 to $20) purely due to AI integration, a benchmark other companies struggle to meet.
Underperformers/Risks:
- Nvidia: Shorting Nvidia in 2026 is deemed a "fool's errand" due to a lack of time for competitors to build sufficient alternative capacity (TPUs) before 2026 ends.
- Amazon: Predicted to underperform in 2026 due to the long timeline required to build competing semiconductor infrastructure against Nvidia.
- Apple: Identified as a risk to short due to the lack of AI integration and stagnant growth, despite its stock holding up on other factors.
- Traditional SaaS: Companies like Adobe, HubSpot, and Atlassian are flagged as risks if they cannot prove "co-attach" revenue (charging extra for AI features) rather than just bundling AI into base packages.

AI-Driven Unemployment: A rise in unemployment of just 2-3 points, regardless of cause (business cycle, tariffs, etc.), is predicted to trigger a massive "tech lash" against AI.
Political Consequences: The prediction is that because AI CEOs have "confessed to the crime" of job displacement, any uptick in unemployment will be politically weaponized against the industry.
Societal Fear: Society is expected to become "terrified" of AI as the human impact of automation becomes statistically undeniable in 2026.
Investment Strategy: The prevailing investor philosophy shifts to "If robots are going to take over society, I want to be sure that I own the robots," favoring ownership of the infrastructure and the creators over the displaced.

Claude 3.5/3.7: Identified as the foundational "product of the year" that enabled the functionality of "vibe coding" tools like Cursor, Replit, and Gamma.
90% AI Power: Cursor, a leading coding tool, is reported to be 90% powered by Anthropic's models.
SaaS Valuation Metrics: A warning was issued against companies claiming "$5B in AI-influenced revenue" (like Adobe) without demonstrating net new bookings or pricing power.
Circular Deals: Despite being mocked, the circular capital flows (e.g., Nvidia investing in OpenAI, which invests in Nvidia) are viewed as a necessary lubricant for the CapEx cycle, with Nvidia aggressively reinvesting its $100B+ free cash flow to maintain the ecosystem.