Top 6 Startup Trends for 2022
Watch for startups to make a big splash in these areas this year
It would not be a proper entry to the new year if there were not a flurry of blogs posts, podcasts, and videos predicting the future. I normally avoid writing or discussing the future because there are plenty of others that jump in to fill that space and no one has a crystal ball. In the tech industry, this is especially tricky because the cycles of tech innovation and novelty turn so rapidly now.
Take the big tech trend of 2021. There were lots of things to get excited about, but the one trend almost everyone missed was NFT’s. The art and auction world went into a frenzy when Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million. Big brands and sports organizations dove into NFT’s. Twitter profile pics changed into cryptopunks and odd-looking apes. NFT’s went fully mainstream, and with NFT’s, so did the idea of buying and trading cryptocurrency, owning a digital wallet, and getting hip to Web3 lingo.
From my vantage point as the Global Startup Advocate at AWS, I have a unique perspective of seeing various trends emerge in my work. I am often in conversations with founders that are just getting started on taking crazy and outlandish ideas and turning them into reality. So, this year I figured, what the hell, let me take a few swings at what is going to be big this year in the startup world.
As I gaze into my crystal ball, let me share with you what I am seeing as the six big themes for 2022 based on based on what startup founders, VC's, accelerators, and the global AWS Startups team have shared with me recently. Here is my TL:DR for those that just want to keep score:
Cloud Sustainability
AI Everywhere
Developer Experience
Workplace Experience
Rise of Web3 Apps
DeFi Reshapes Fintech
None of these ideas are wholly new. Rather what I am highlighting are areas of tech within the startup ecosystem where a lot of energy, investment, and innovation is happening!
If you want to know more about my thinking into how these trends are shaping up this coming year, read on as I dive deep into each.
Cloud Sustainability means the technology and processes to make cloud infrastructure more climate friendly. Servers not only cost money, they also require a ton of power to operate and keep cool. When Adrian Cockcroft, VP of Cloud at AWS, moved to a new role in Amazon focused on sustainability, I knew something big was coming. Then AWS did two things. First, we added a new leadership principle “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility”. Second, a new pillar was added to the AWS well-architected framework focused on sustainability. Expect to see more solutions emerge from startups that help companies use less compute, such as architecting for serverless, or green tech startups that enable greater efficiency from data management to server optimization for workloads that require dedicated compute. As more and more compute gets pushed out to the edge, look for startups to build solutions that leverage sustainability through edge technologies, simulations, and robotics applications.
AI is everywhere. Before only accessible to the most technical and resource rich teams, ease of use and more robust purpose-built AI services have changed how AI can be incorporated. This allows more startups to enable their apps with richer and more robust experiences for customers. We can see this with AWS AI services such as Rekognition, Lex, and Polly as well as tools like SageMaker Canvas that have lowered the technical bar for startups to be AI driven from the onset, without the massive upfront costs in talent or acquiring and training data sets. Whereas a few years ago, we might have laughed at many startups saying they were “AI startups”. This year we will see the real deal.
Developer Experience is becoming an all-important advantage when building. Startups are seeking platforms to get them going fast, which is the only real advantage a startup has early on. Developers have already seen huge strides in recent years with tools to get launched faster, to iterate more quickly, and to rearchitect when they hit scale. AWS recognized this need releasing Amplify a few years back and then recently announcing Amplify Studio to enable faster development and connecting back-end to front end developers. Expect lots more startups leap into this space much like we have seen with Supabase, Vercel, and others, that can tie all the pieces of modern app development together seamlessly, manage DevOps in the background, and cobble together all the infrastructure pieces to ensure the code deploys and scales. This is also another area where startups that help engineering teams in serverless development can gain traction.
Workplace Experience has been permanently reshaped. Nearly two years into COVID, the nature, scope, and relationship with work and our workplaces has fundamentally changed. Remote work had been a sideshow prior to 2020, never something seriously considered by most startups. Companies like Automattic, Buffer, and GitLab were some notable exceptions. Today the new normal is distributed. While hybrid is mentioned, the future of work is default distributed for most companies for reasons of recruiting, access to talent, and operational costs. This is the Work 4.0 era, introducing new ways of crafting workplaces and experiences that enhance communication, collaboration, and community within the traditional organization. We will also see the reinventing of the “organization” to extend and encompass external parties of customers, partners, and industry associations as a “hypercommunity” to foster deeper relationships and innovative ideas. The next wave of startups are poised to create the true vision of Work 4.0, and thinking beyond Zoom, Slack, and employee monitoring to support truly effective and much less traumatic distributed workplaces that enable more effective asynchronous working.
Rise of Web3 will be seen through the world of apps. NFT’s were the breakout success of 2021, but are still considered a toy, a scam, or the savior of artists depending on who you speak to. NFT’s were only just a starting point for Web3. Developers and entrepreneurs started seeing real value creation, whether from a monetization perspective or from the level of freedom granted through decentralization. This has created a rush into learning how to build on the blockchain, how to finance projects through crypto, and how to structure communities through DAO’s. Though these new wave of apps will look more like analogs of Web2 apps, I believe we are poised to see truly novel ideas take shape from startups ready to leapfrog into new territory now that the fundamentals of building in the Web3 space are more certain.
DeFi reshapes Fintech and eats traditional finance for lunch. Innovation is happening at breakneck speed in all industries. Seeing a Covid19 vaccine released in a year was one such example. The industry poised for the most disruption though is finance. Blockchain is enabling different ways of restructuring the traditional customer-entity relationship and ushering in infinite opportunities for startups to build new types of decentralized entities to better serve customers and lower costs. Even though this trend ties into what I already mentioned about Web3, the pace and level of disruption is something worth calling out specifically. There is an ecosystem of apps and protocols all around a truly decentralized model of finance that is only now beginning to be explored. For example, what does it mean to be a decentralized bank and what controls would there be to ensure fraud, theft, and money laundering are policed? These and many other questions are what make this such an exciting area when it comes to the true application of Web3 and the movement towards decentralization.
These were not my only candidates that I had considered, but it would not be very focused if I followed everything that I saw that was interesting. There are incredibly fascinating innovations in Space Tech with the cost of satellites being significantly cheaper. Robotics and IoT are also interesting from the standpoint of how intelligence and compute is being further pushed to the edge. And then the pace of innovation in biotech through the power and flexibility of the cloud is unleashing impactful new therapies and drugs in ever shorter cycles.
What are your thoughts on the six trends I shared? Are there other areas that you think will see more innovation and breakout startups in 2022?
Mark Birch, Editor & Founder of DEV.BIZ.OPS
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful and restful holiday season. Even with the insanity that is COVID still working its way through humanity with more mutant strains, I was still able to getaway for a while in relative safety and health in Miami.
As I took some much needed downtime and get some long walks in along the boardwalk, I got to thinking about crazy ideas I might want to explore in 2022. One thing that stood out was the fact that TikTok is now the world’s most popular site globally, ahead of Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Wow, mind blown!
So I got this notion that maybe TikTok was not just dumb dance videos and memes anymore. Could someone like me use it to reach startups founders, developers, and IT leaders? Well, I said why not just start an account and create some tech related videos for folks interested in startups, cloud technologies, AWS, and tech trends!
If you are on TikTok (or maybe spurred on to open your own account), you can follow me at startupmark and I already have four videos uploaded, including one about this very topic of top startup tech trends.
The second thought I had was something I wanted to do last year, but never got the time to pull it off properly. I want this DEVBIZOPS space to not just be an audience that receives my newsletter, but a proper community. I am going to make that happen this year, now that my focus at AWS is going to be on community building. Let me know if you want to pitch in or be involved. I might even let you take part in the NFT drop for this community 🤣
Anyway folks, take care and look forward to sharing more of my adventures this coming year. Let me know what you are up to and if you have any exciting plans for 2022 that you wish to share!
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