Investing In The Future: What the Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors are Asking Me

Recently, I’ve had two absolutely fascinating session, each about 2-3 hours in length.

In one case, a major private equity firm engaged me to meet with their main advisory board In another case, I met with a group of very wealthy investors who were / are owners of major family held businesses, with valuations into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

In both cases, these small, intimate meetings (with 20-40 people) were built around a structure in which I would cover a wide variety of future trends where I saw significant opportunity in the future. We then had a wide ranging discussion around these opportunities and a very lively debate.

Both were pretty heavy duty groups, with current and ex-CEO’s, Congressmen, Senators, venture capitalists and angel investors, university professors and researchers. Without getting into a lot of detail, one of the events had me take on four specific issues. These are the key areas that I spoke about:

• big data: what’s beyond the hype, and what’s real?
• intellectual property – what’s next as a venture play
• oil & gas & US energy self-sufficiency: what sideline opportunities are emerging
• regulatory challenges: as the velocity of change runs up against regulation, who will emerge as unique winners?

In the other case, I defined future opportunities in the context of the vast, transformative trends that are upending industries, providing for massive business model innovation, and for a lot of competitive disruption:

• pervasive connectivity: massive opportunity as every device is connected, and we have awareness as to its status, location and IP address
• big, bold movers: the phrase I use for organizations who are in a transformative frame of mind in solving big problems in healthcare, energy and the environment
• revenue reinventors: how to find the signs of organizations reinventing their revenue stream at a furious pace, which is fundamental to success in todays economy
• health care reform: what’s really happening, and who’s really innovating far beyond the political bluster. Think bioconnectivity, virtuality, mobility, wireless.
• the future energy: opportunities beyond shale which involve accelerating science. Cows!

These types of sessions are tremendously invigorating; I really enjoy them, and the feedback in both cases was fabulous.

So there’s another thing that a futurist does that you might have never thought we do.