Every great company was built in a downturn.
Google. Tesla. Airbnb. Uber. OpenAI. All founded when everyone else stopped building.
We just published our State of the Market report, a look at 26 years of venture cycles and what they tell us about right now.
The short version: the same four forces that drove every prior bust are playing out again. And the same three signals that marked the bottom of 2003, 2010, and 2021 are flashing today.
→ The field has cleared
→ A new platform has arrived (AI is broadband-level, not hype-level)
→ The exit window is reopening, a wave of mega-IPOs is set to unlock ~$3T in trapped value
What’s different this time: past cycles digitized the easy 20% of the economy (software, media, ads). Physical AI reaches the other 80%: manufacturing, logistics, energy, construction. The sectors that have spent the least on technology until now.
The companies being built in this trough, on that infrastructure, will be the Googles and Ubers of the 2030s.
Click to Read Full Deck.