16 Startup Trends That Will Be Huge in 2015

1. Virtual reality
"Computer enthusiasts and science fiction writers have
dreamed about VR for decades. But earlier attempts to
develop it, especially in the 1990s, were disappointing. It
turns out the technology wasn’t ready yet. What’s
happening now — because of Moore’s Law, and also the
rapid improvement of processors, screens, and
accelerometers, driven by the smartphone boom — is
that VR is finally ready to go mainstream," Chris Dixon, a
general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says .
We've already started to see the emergence of virtual
reality: people are still excited and curious about Oculus,
which Facebook announced it was acquiring last
March . Microsoft and Apple are also reportedly exploring
virtual reality too.
2. Improving enterprise software design
Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Weiss says this is
the year for enterprise to play catch-up . Enterprise
companies need to get up to speed with consumer-
facing startups, which have already created beautiful,
functional interfaces, especially on mobile.
"Enterprise UI is woefully behind," he says. "All those
well-understood motions that have taken hold from our
everyday smartphone behaviors — pinch, zoom, swipe,
tap, speak, even just moving stuff around with our
fingers — have yet to take hold in the enterprise. The
user interface has always been an afterthought, the last
thing one did after building a database. That is changing
now."
3. Machine learning and big data
Andreessen Horowitz's Peter Levine says we're going to
continue to see big data as a trend this year.
"Where business intelligence before was about past
aggregates ('How many red shoes have we sold in
Kentucky?'), it will now demand predictive insights ('How
many red shoes will we sell in Kentucky?')," he says. "An
important implication of this is that machine learning will
not be an activity in and of itself … it will be a property of
every application. There won’t be a standalone function,
'Hey, let’s use that tool to predict.'"
4. The full-stack startup
Chris Dixon thinks you should put your money behind
" full-stack startups " — companies that "build a complete,
end-to-end product or service that bypasses incumbents
and other competitors," he says. He uses Apple as an
example of a full-stack company — it makes its own
chips, apps, and retail stores.
Dixon thinks Lyft and Uber are full-stack startups.
"Companies like Lyft and Uber said: 'You know what?
Instead of trying to sell software as an add-on, we’re
going just going build the whole service using our
modern software.' They asked: What would this industry
look like if it were rebuilt from scratch using technology
we have today?"
5. Containers
Computing has become more efficient since it first
started, but Peter Levine says containers will be huge in
2015 .
"Containers aren’t actually a new thing. They’ve been
around for a long time, but are taking off for a few
reasons," he says. "One reason is because Windows has
become less prevalent in the datacenter; one of the
downsides of containers compared to VMs is that they
can’t run multiple operating systems, like Windows on
top of Linux. Another reason is 'microservices' app
architecture driving enthusiasm for containers; these app
architectures are especially suited to containers because
they have discrete pieces of functionality that can scale
independently, like LEGO building blocks."
6. Digital health
A lot of medicine that's being practiced today — a lot of
the devices doctors use — is being designed by people
without medical degrees. Andreessen Horowitz's Balaji
Srinivasan says the trend of mobile and digital health
will continue to increase this year.
"One center of action is likely going to be the mobile
programmable medical record — the container for all
diagnostics and test results — something like what
Apple’s HealthKit may evolve into," he says. "All this
diagnostic history isn’t necessarily 'big data'; it’s just
never been tracked and cross-correlated before in one
place. Once technologies like HealthKit get a little more
traction, millions of software engineers without MDs can
build new applications on top of that data store (perhaps
collected by other applications) without injuring the
phone owner."
7. Online marketplaces
Online marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist have been
super successful. But Jeff Jordan, a partner at
Andreessen Horowitz, says the next trends to watch with
e-commerce and marketplace spaces include businesses
that are built by fleshing out niche services you'd find on
Craigslist, like ridesharing or sublets; "mobile-first"
marketplaces; "people marketplaces," where you can
find niche services like Instacart or Glamsquad; and
marketplaces for new segments, like B2B.
8. Security
2014 was not a great year for password
security. Between the Sony leaks , the large-scale iCloud
photo hack that resulted in private, naked pictures of
celebrities leaking online, and security breaches at
companies like Target and Home Depot, it seemed
everyone was vulnerable to having their privacy
breached.
So it comes as no surprise that one trend Scott Weiss
is predicting will be big in 2015 is security . Companies
that can identify when and where data breaches occur
and then lock everything down and do damage control
will be invaluable.
9. Bitcoin (and blockchain)
Even though the price of bitcoin has been
dropping, Balaji Srinivasan says there are three things to
consider in regards to the cryptocurrency this year . First,
he says, bitcoin is still really new — so we should except
adoption to increase significantly in 2015. Srinivasan
also says we can expect new payment applications to
develop for bitcoin, and that we should consider bitcoin
as infrastructure.
10. Cloud-client computing
Peter Levine says there's a lot of potential with
computing today to make your devices work more
efficiently.
"We have more processing power in our hands today
through smartphones than we did in large computers
decades ago. So why shouldn’t some of this processing
move out of the cloud and back into the endpoint, into
the phone?," he says . "Doing processing locally has its
advantages. For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU
and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU
and memory in the server. And in many places around
the world, connectivity and transmission costs are
sometimes far more expensive than the device."
11. Crowdfunding
When we think of crowdfunding now, we think about
sitting at our computers and occasionally donating to
someone's potato salad project or a movie campaign on
Kickstarter. Jeff Jordan says this will change. "With
smartphones in our pockets, we not only have access to
crowdfunding platforms whenever we want, but to
the crowd that comprises the various social circles of
our lives — from family to school, work, and the region
we live in," he says.
12. Internet of Things
Scott Weiss says the solution to our society's culture of
planned obsolescence — where you constantly have to
replace old or broken devices because they're not built to
last forever — is the Internet of Things. "We tend to
focus on the glorified outcomes [of IoT] but the
mundane ones are equally if not more powerful," he
says.
"The IoT could change things here, and create a new
culture of repair. If you’re a small family-owned
restaurant that can’t afford to constantly upgrade
equipment or fix things, you can answer a whole new
set of questions with the IoT: Is that freezer working
extra hard because someone left the door open, or
because its compressor is about to fail and you’re about
to lose $6,000 in food?"
13. Online video
YouTube has been around for a decade, but Jeff Jordan
says online video is still just ramping up now . He
predicts YouTube will be carved out by entrepreneurs
and companies for their own purposes. Besides new
ways of monetizing video, Jordan says new forms of
video advertising will emerge, and YouTube will start
taking better care of its stars. Jordan also says other
players could get in on the online video game too — it
doesn't have to be all about YouTube.
14. Insurance
Software and data have improved, Andreessen
Horowitz's Frank Chen says, so shouldn't the way we
purchase our insurance also change? "Software will
rewrite the entire way we buy and experience our
insurance products — medical, home, auto, and life," he
says, in three major ways : "By changing the way
insurance companies price risk; by empowering an
ongoing relationship between an insurer and insured;
and by changing the way insurance companies pool
capital."
15. DevOps
DevOps — a portmanteau of the words "developer" and
"operations — is a skill-set that any modern programmer
should have, Scott Weiss says . He says there's a lot of
opportunity for DevOps to grow this year.
"The rise of the hyperscale cloud datacenter has
now made this job much harder as developers have had
to hack together tools and complex scripts for pushing
code to thousands of pancake servers," he says. "This
complex cloud infrastructure — coupled with the growth
of the DevOps movement today — has opened up many
opportunities, starting with helping developers and
companies to manage the entire process … to much
more."
16. 'Failure'
"'The goal is not to fail fast. The goal is to succeed over
the long run. They are not the same thing.'…Enough
said," the VC firm says on its website, paraphrasing a
tweet by known tweetstormer and Andreessen Horowitz
co-founder Marc Andreessen : "My goal is not to fail fast.
My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not
the same thing."