November by D’Ornano + Co.: Building Robustness in 2024, Open-source AI models vs AI regulation, and looking back at 2023 in charts.

This is our monthly newsletter dedicated to Tech x Investments.

Dear readers,

Another year is ending, and what a year this has been in Tech!

It was a year full of optimism – with the platform shift brought by genAI – but also of pessimism – as private market investments continued to decline sharply with a string of collapses and layoffs.

It has also been a year of polarization, which will also characterize the year to come. On the one hand, there will be those companies that seize the tremendous opportunity of genAI – from start-ups deploying new ideas across the entire genAI tech stack to incumbents transforming their operations – and that thrive in an a risky environment (see below). Then there will be those that leave a game they are no longer able to compete in. In this latter category, will be scale-up “titans” that raised massive rounds in 2021 (+/- 6 months) and that no one thought would collapse and yet do as their cash runway ends.

What will position a company at either end of the spectrum? Who will be a winner or a loser in the 2024 investme…