Welcome to Nonrival, the newsletter where readers make predictions.
How it works
- Read the newsletter
- Make a forecast by clicking a link at the bottom
- In the next email, you’ll see how your forecast compares to other readers’
- Over time, you’ll get scores based on how accurate your forecasts are
In this issue
- Follow-up: Remote work forecasts from September have been scored (if you made one, you’ll see how you did)
- Make a forecast: Will US venture capital funding keep falling in Q4?
Thanks for forecasting. Send feedback to newsletter@nonrival.pub.
Remote work forecasts, scored
In September, Nonrival partnered with Stanford economist Nick Bloom to forecast the trajectory of work-from-home and whether it would keep declining as the pandemic eased.
We asked: How likely is it that the share of full, paid US work days done from home is 29% or higher in September? (In August it was 29.5%)
The average of readers’ forecasts was 44%, suggesting the crowd thought it was slightly more likely than not that work-from-home would decline to below 29% of full-time work days in September.
The September data is out: 29.1% of full, paid work days in the US were done from home, according to Bloom’s survey.
That means higher forecasts scored better, because the September value was in fact 29% or higher.
You said there was a [091822_FINAL GOES HERE]% chance of that happening. Your forecast was closer to the actual outcome than [091822_BRIER_RANK GOES HERE]% of readers.
How far will VC funding fall?
The decade-long tech boom is over, at least for now. Venture capital funding in the US plunged in Q3, dropping 40% from Q2. Third quarter investment was about half of Q3 the year before.
Like so many other sectors of the economy, VC is being dragged down by rising interest rates, lower growth prospects, and ongoing uncertainty. But will VC funding fall even further? Or will it start to rebound? The answer will help determine the fate of a generation’s worth of tech startups.
Background
US VC funding rose steadily from 2010 through 2020, then shot up in 2021. Funding has declined every quarter of 2022 so far. Even so, 2022 has already seen more VC funding than any year other than 2021.
The last big VC bust was in 2001. It took more than a decade for US VC funding to match its dotcom peak. But the asset class was much smaller and less mature, and tech was a much smaller share of the economy.
VC investment depends on the amount of money looking for risky, long-term investments and on the number of promising technology startups. But in the short-run, VC can depend on mood and momentum. As Eric Paley, a VC, puts it: “People have to be able to dream to invest in stuff.”
VCs are sitting on a record amount of committed capital. The case for VC rebounding is that this “dry powder” will eventually get spent. But VCs can choose to slow the pace at which they invest that money.
Perspectives
Indicators
Forecast
How likely is it that US VC funding in Q4 of 2022 will be higher than Q3? ($43B or higher)
Deadline: Make a forecast by 9am ET Wednesday Oct. 19
Fine print: This question will be resolved based on the quarterly PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report.
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