In this post, Khosla lays out the trends he sees as a contrarian superman (exactly 2 years ago):
The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile | TechCrunch.
He names 12 areas and namechecks quite a few companies that are early but some that were already juggernauts. (Pinterest was already super hot in early 2012 and Twitter/Tumblr of course were huge.)
How did he do?
2 for 10 is my scoring. He was right that the area a “Health 2.0” (Fitbit…) and “Utility apps” (Uber…) have created massive valuable companies. I don’t give him credit for “Interest based communities” (Twitter) or “Collaborative publishing” (Pinterest, Tumblr) since those were well on their way. The other 8 on his list… you be the judge.
Maybe that’s good enough if you are superman — if he had invested $10mm on a good play in each trend, he would have 50x from the two hot ones.