My Hilariously Incomplete Summary of 2025.
From an early investors perspective.
Before giving predictions on 2026, I wanted to summarize 2025 in my own way. As I said yesterday in my blog post, 2025 was awesome for Boost VC, but let me chat about this on a Macro perspective.
There are two great “Must Read” summaries of 2025 that I have read:
Fred Wilson from USV is always spot on with the summary of what matters. (Link to Blog Post)
Dan Wang from Hoover History Lab with his "2025 Letter” (Link to Blog Post)
My summary is a little more focused on the psychology or emotional state of the early stage investor.
First - Lets talk about what an investor is. At it’s foundation an investor is a person who participates in the brilliant invention of ownership. That ownership could be real estate, Private Equity, Stocks, Bonds, and in the case of Venture Capital: Human Endeavor. The belief that the value of something you buy today will be worth more in the future creates a fascinating world of capital allocation.
By owning something, an investor is taking a risk. That risk is based on each investor’s own internal scale of “Risk/Reward.” Often an investor may be confused with a gambler because their scale is more aggressive, and equally an investor could be ridiculed as a hoarder or scaredy cat because their scale is more cautious.
In that entire spectrum, investment decisions are made based on that “internal scale” as an individual - but the market doesn’t act as a bunch of individuals - it acts as a mob on the day to day.
Looking from the outside in: In hard times, everyone looks like a hoarder, and in great times everyone looks like a gambler. And those actions are determined by all the psychology and scale of all the players in the market: The Government, The institutions (banks), the Consumer, the Investor, and Warren Buffett (kidding, but not), and what they all want.
When thinking about 2025 I can’t help but think about the psychology of the investors in the arena, and how the early stage investors emotional state changed over the course of a year.
The things that are clear to me from 2025:
Capital can now centralize very quickly, every investor has access and capacity to buy almost every asset. So when one wants something - everyone seems to run at it.
Secondary markets are the norm now: Not many people have touched on this in their posts, but one of the things that definitely became a “Here to stay” is the existence of secondary markets - especially for valuation pricing, and partial liquidity for VCs. We are seeing the largest Valuations ever in the private market because Public capital is flying towards 10 companies in the private market. (Spacex, Anduril, OpenAi…)
The Pro-America movement chalked up some great investment gains in the first year with Trump in office for those investing in the frontier. Space, Defense, Ai have had remarkable price growth, and with it - talent has flooded those markets. This follows of theme, where the institution of Government is influencing early stage investing more than I have ever seen it in my career.
Although still problems, SF is back. Artificial intelligence headquarters lives in the brains of 18-25 year olds in San Francisco. People are moving there from all over the world to pay homage to the Mecca of Ai. Holistically, I still think that SF has systemic problems that Garry Tan and others in the Tech community are fighting to fix in SF.
Texas vs. California. Florida vs. New York.
100% of Pro-Crypto representatives were elected during the 2024 elections, which has led to clarity and breakthroughs for Stablecoins, Bitcoin and enthusiasm.
Things you may have forgot for a moment that happened in 2025: New Pope was elected, Charlie Kirk was Assassinated, DOGE was a huge thing, Astronauts were stuck in Space, America invested in and owns 10% of Intel, Spacex launched 167 rockets (RocketLab did 21), Firefly Aerospace was the first private company to get to the moon with the Blue Ghost Lander.
In conclusion - 2025 fast forwarded movements that were happening, technical, governmental and social. Financially, for the time being it feels we are more than ever tied to the whims of the government enthusiasm around tech advancement, Which has been a reward to the early stage investor - but what happens in 2026. I BELIEVE GREAT THINGS!!!!