Inflation is high, labor is tight, trade is falling - I'd be willing to take a bet on industrial automation and robotics powered by modern AI and 3-d printing.

XR headsets from big players also coming this or next year, which may bring new use cases and new apps

In 2008 you'd have said the same thing, most likely.

Future will be great. Hang tight, it's turbulence. Don't fall for the pessimism.

I don’t think you’d say the same thing in 2008. Sure, you probably wouldn’t be able to predict the magnitude of VC interest or even the timing, but I think that in 2008 smartphones were pretty clearly the hot new emerging product and you didn’t have to be a tech person to see it. Is there something like that now? Maybe electric cars?

In 2008 social networking, casual gaming, and Web 2.0 were the hot new emerging product category. That's what everyone (me included) was founding and funding. Hell, Hacker News dates from that wave.

Mobile was an interesting curiosity that had piqued a lot of interest, but people didn't really know what to make of it. Same with cloud, which had just started with AWS. I remember folding up my casual game-creation startup (think Roblox on the web) in 2008 and thinking of my next move, and briefly thinking "Maybe I'll just go learn Android or iPhone development. Nah, I'd have to completely retool my skillset and I still don't see how something with such a small screen could be useful."

Electric cars are almost certainly not the equivalent today - everybody knows how and why you'd use an electric car, there's billions in capital going into the space, and all the major incumbents have electric car plans.

I'd bet on something like drones, 3D-printing, DeFi, multi-device ecosystems, robotics, or hardware. Look for something that people (particularly kids) are interested in; recently gotten cheap enough for hobbyists to play with it; there are lots of players in the market and few incumbents; limited regulatory barriers; and we don't really know what it's for yet.

Electric cars is a good one. So is electric transportation in general. There's been this explosion in diversity of personalized travel in the last few years: e-scooters, e-bikes, e-bike kits, hoverboards, weird electric unicycles. It's like I rarely see the same form of locomotion more than once, and I'm not even in a major metropolitan area.