Defrag Blog

This morning I’m thinking about how weird and wonderful and topsy turvy the next 3-5 years are going to be. I’m thinking about “what if” scenarios. Not predictions. Not pontifications. Not even well-reasoned thought. Just “what if” scenarios…

What if…the Foundry Group, Jeff Clavier, YCombinator, Union Square, TechStars “method” of being a VC became the prominent one, and the big boys (Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins) found themselves with a broken model?

What if…a bunch of tech-saavy VC/entrepreneurial types actually set up a marketplace for the equity of private companies and re-ignited the ability to “exit” (at some level) for startups.?(Kedrosky - if you do this, I wanna work on it.)

What if…the automakers (per Fred Wilson’s suggestion) ended up busted up, not bailed out, and owned largely by private equity firms?

What if…the “enterprise 2.0″ space stumbles upon an innovation in productivity so HUGE that it’s akin to the productivity gains we first saw when email became corporate common-place?

What if…Google lost it’s dominance and Facebook became a failed experiment?

What if…TechCrunch turned out to be a “web 2.0 phenomenon” and shuttered it’s doors?

What if…we stopped seeing incremental gains in tech innovation and saw a true “gap jump?”

What if…oil rose with the recovery, but didn’t go above $80?

What if…Tesla went under, but the Volt was a huge success?

What if…Boulder, Pittsburgh, the Twin Cities, Austin, New York and the Research Triangle replaced Silicon Valley as “the epicenter” of innovation?

What if…Novell and Sun went private (can we please get this done? please?)?

What if…eBay went under, but not before spinning out PayPal in an acqusition to a regional bank?

What if…the only “bank” left standing at the end of this is Wells Fargo and a bunch of decent balance sheet regionals?

What if…hedge fund managers start getting paid on the same time frames as their investors?

What if…all of this “end of the American Empire” talk is silly, and the country emerges from this a nation of fiscally responsible, energized entrepreneurs (and rugged individualists)?

What if…all of this is part of a larger “networking of everything” phenomenon that’s occurring. And the result is a more distributed, intelligence at the edges — everything (national infrastructure, finance, state initiatives, etc)?

What if…Cisco buys Salesforce.com and the Amazon Web Services part of Amazon?

What if…the “new” James Bond movies continue to be as good as Casino Royale?

What if…the long-term demographic “shift” to the southwest and southeast continues and the majority of America resides there by the year 2025? (okay, that wasn’t 3-5 years.)

Yeah, it’ll probably never happen, right? But on the other hand….