According to the American "Wall Street" on January 20, the past decade has been full of ideas that are easy to demonstrate but impossible to turn into real business opportunities.
The historic era of low interest rates is gone, as is the steady stream of cheap money that supported these businesses, the report said.
As companies continue to go out of business and corporate sponsors scale back their investments, it's now clear what these technologies are. That's virtual worlds, blockchain, and self-driving cars.
The fact that these technologies do not achieve the results they advertise does not mean that they are doomed to fail. But it does mean that the era of their contraction and divestment may have just begun.
While the nature of the venture capital industry is betting, these technologies have garnered billions of dollars in investment and have yet to show a path to success.
Since at least 2015, some investors have warned us that the venture capital industry and the companies it supports are in a state of irrational exuberance – and these are finally starting to become a reality.
Metaverse. Just over two years ago, the company, formerly known as Facebook, changed its name to a metaverse platform company, in part to show its belief in the virtual world.
What kind of belief is this: For the past two years, the company has lost $3 billion to $4 billion a quarter in its metaverse business.
The metaverse should be a three-dimensional virtual world, a substitute for the real world. It's a world where we can do all sorts of activities that we would otherwise have to do outside the house, like socializing and shopping.
In a world where people still tend to stay home, it makes a lot of sense, but now we all remember how wonderful real life is.
Then it doesn't make much sense.
For Mark Zuckerberg in 2021, his company's most notable success over the past two years may surprise ......The company launched a TikTok-like Reels short feature on Instagram, as well as a clone of Twitter called Threads.
This may help explain why the metaverse platform company has recently changed course and de-emphasized how its headsets can immerse you in the virtual world.
It in turn pushes the potential of the device to overlay the real world with virtual elements – aka "augmented reality".
Blockchain. Bitcoin had a highlight moment thanks to the approval of Bitcoin Exchange Trading (ETF) by the U.S. Exchange Commission.
But it's hardly an endorsement of the underlying technology – blockchain.
If anything, the adoption of Bitcoin ETFs by mainstream financial firms has inexorably shown that none of the other expressions of the blockchain have produced anything truly substantial or valuable – at least not yet.
It's easy to forget that just a few years ago, blockchain revolutionaries were going to reboot the entire internet by building it on top of so-called "web3" technology.
The big idea is to take anything you might want to own or trade – from art and in-game currency to carbon credits called "goddess nature tokens" – into non-replicable units of data on the blockchain.
These "tokens" can then be traded, tracked, and acquired by any company or individual.
Autonomous driving. Nowadays, in some cities, under the right conditions, in a limited geographical area, you can ride in a self-driving car.
However, some technologies take much longer to succeed than the initial demonstration and commitment made us believe.
Like electric vehicles, self-driving cars are part of this technology.
There are countless barriers to the rollout of self-driving cars.
For example, they shift the responsibility of the driver to the vehicle manufacturer or the operator of the robo-taxi service.
That's just one of the reasons why they're not as good as human drivers, but they're certainly much safer.
Another big obstacle is cost.
Sensor arrays (cameras, radar, and lidar) and the large computers that the vehicle has to carry to process all the data largely offset the cost savings that autonomous vehicles should have.
In addition, the cost of mapping and remapping the areas where these vehicles travel is also high.
Scott Cominas, a crypto research partner at Andresen-Horowitz and a professor at Harvard Business School, said the common denominator of the three technologies — virtual worlds, blockchain and autonomous driving — is that they are all "universal" technologies that must be adapted to a variety of other things, including laws, infrastructure and people's expectations.
Changing everything in a society – from how cryptocurrencies are regulated, to whether people want to work in virtual reality, to the laws that should hold everyone responsible in the event of an accident with a self-driving car – will take a lot of time.
This could be much longer than the billions of dollars that have already been invested in these technologies can sustain. (Compiled by Ge Xuelei).
A self-driving taxi on the streets of San Francisco, U.S., Feb. 15, 2023. (Associated Press).