What tiny market today will be worth trillions in the future?

Source: Giphy

Sam Altman — the entrepreneur who ran Y Combinator and now heads OpenAI — made an offer in 2015.

He put up $100k and challenged anyone calling tech a “bubble” to take the other side of his pricing predictions for January 2020, including whether:

1. Uber, Palantir, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, and SpaceX would be worth $200B+
2. A selection of Y Combinator startups (e.g., Stripe, Instacart, Coinbase) would be worth $27B+

Altman was off on prediction No. 1 (by a few months)

But blew No. 2 out of the water and also got a 3rd prediction right.

Since he had to win all parts of the bet, though, Altman ended up paying $100k to a charity.

It’s always a blast when Altman fires up pricing questions

And, he served up another banger this weekend when he asked the internet, “What tiny/nonexistent markets today will be trillion dollar markets in 10-20 years?”

There have been 1k+ responses including:

• Space tourism
• DNA synthesis
• Virtualization of travel
• Personalized medicine
• 3D printing architecture
• Carbon capture and storage
• Standardizing the gig economy
• Commercialized psychedelic medicine
• Electric charging station mini market stores (7-11 meets Tesla)

The most popular was: “Falling romantically in love with something digital and artificial but extremely realistic.”