The next big thing in 2026 will be...

[Nikhil Basu Trivedi at Next Big Thing]

There’s a lot of interesting food for thought in this roundup of predictions for 2026 from investors, founders, and technology leaders. AI is dominant here — most people predict it will continue to be transformative at all levels of tech, which feels like a safe bet — but there’s another theme that I think is worth drawing out.

ClassDojo CEO Sam Chaudhary suggests:

“The atomic unit of execution inside companies collapses to a one-person squad; a ‘full-stack operator.’ As AI reduces the cost of execution to near zero, the right person can out-build a 50-person org. The bottleneck becomes finding full-stack operators with curiosity, taste, and judgment.”

To emphasize: the important thing in this prediction is finding people who can operate across the stack; their curiosity, taste, and judgment become pivotal.

Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at USV, suggests:

“The next big thing in 2026 will be a fresh boom of consumer platforms. Boredom with older platforms + curiosity at what new tools can create + continued desire for connection and the new will usher this in. After a long stretch of it being too hard to interrupt incumbents, the cracks are showing and the newer, the weirder the better as we crave new consumer digital experiences and connection.”

And I think most importantly, Homebrew Partner Hunter Walk adds:

“The next big thing in 2026 will be Kindness. Apolitical, nondenominational, online and offline kindness. Mainstream tech population is exhausted by the escalations of the last decade. Begins investing time and energy in more community, civics, and charity. Leaves the most toxic social spaces to trolls and bots.”

In other words, it’s going to be the squishy human stuff that is going to become central to tech. In many ways it really always has — tech has always been a people business at its heart — but putting it at the center of the discourse is a change. And in a world where AI is becoming more and more prevalent, particularly in transforming how code is written and deployed, it makes sense that it would be.

I do want to add a note about “taste”: I’ve always hated that term for cultural judgments. Taste is subjective, not just from person to person but from culture to culture. When we talk about it, and particularly when we evaluate it, I think there’s a real danger that we do so from one (culturally dominant) demographic and context. I’d like to argue that the only sense of taste that really matters is if you make something that resonates for someone else. If we try and make someone’s work fit into a broader, shared “taste” aesthetic, we run the risk of making it bland at best, and whitewashed at worst.

But I’m pro-human. To the extent that these predictions put human experience, communities, and values first and foremost, I’m excited for the future they describe.

[Link]