At the start of 2026, the 60/40 team made predictions for how the tech industry would fare for the year. Six months later, we pulled out the scorecard.
Some calls aged well. Google’s AI mode is now the default search experience for a generation that has never learned to click a link. Anthropic emerged as a genuine OpenAI challenger faster than almost anyone expected. Canva kept executing – up 40% in revenue, heading toward a US$60 billion IPO. AI specialist roles are proliferating across industries, not just inside frontier model companies.
But the bigger story wasn’t what we got right. It was what’s quietly breaking underneath things that still look healthy.
The sharpest conversation was about AI startup revenue. How much of the industry’s explosive ARR growth is genuine customer demand, and how much is trials dressed up as revenue, kept alive by venture capital and pricing models that haven’t yet met reality?
The first company to charge closer to actual cost will face one of two outcomes: either their product is good enough that users stay, or everyone migrates to whoever hasn’t raised prices yet. Aleksey’s prediction: the reckoning comes three to six months after the first major IPO.
We also got into AI coding tools, which accelerate output on one side and erode accountability on the other. Developers are shipping more code than ever, but do they actually understand what’s going into production?
Then we made fresh bets for H2: China’s next AI breakout, nuclear power’s resurgence, cybersecurity winners, AI-native entertainment studios, and the startup categories we’d avoid entirely right now.
Half right, fully accountable. We’ll revisit our predictions at year-end to settle the score.
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