What We're Watching for in 2026

Forecasting the year ahead is a popular exercise and usually a wrong one. Predictions made in January about December tend to be either too generic to be useful or too specific to be right. We're not going to predict 2026.

What we will do is name a few patterns we think are already underway, that have implications for how founders and operators should be thinking about their businesses. These aren't bets on what will happen. They're observations about what's already happening that hasn't been fully absorbed yet.

The AI productivity gap is widening.

The companies that have successfully integrated AI tools into their actual workflows are starting to operate at meaningfully different cost structures than the companies that haven't. The gap is showing up in revenue per employee, time-to-market, and the kinds of work that small teams can take on.

This isn't about whether AI is overhyped or underhyped — both critiques are partially right. It's about the operational reality that companies that have figured out which specific tasks to automate and how to manage the resulting workflows are getting more output from fewer people. The companies that are still using AI tools in scattered, ad-hoc ways are not seeing those gains.

The implication for founders: if you haven't done a serious audit of where AI tools could change your operating model, you're falling behind companies that have. This isn't a 2026 trend; it's a 2024 trend that has compounded into a meaningful gap, and the gap will keep widening.

The retail-DTC hybrid model is becoming the standard.

We covered the consumer brand reshaping in detail, but it's worth flagging again because it's accelerating. New consumer brands launching now are increasingly assuming wholesale distribution from day one, treating direct-to-consumer as a flagship rather than the only channel. Brands launching pure-DTC are facing harder economics than they would have a few years ago.

For founders considering consumer categories, this is a real shift. The playbook has changed. Building a consumer brand without a retail strategy is harder than it was, and the brands that figure out retail early have a structural advantage over brands that come to retail later.

Mid-market PR and communications work is being unbundled.

Traditional PR agencies have been losing share to a combination of in-house communications teams, freelance specialists, creator-led marketing, and AI-assisted content production. The result is that companies in the $1M-50M revenue range are increasingly piecing together communications strategies from multiple smaller providers rather than retaining traditional agencies.

This is creating opportunity for founders building specialized communications services — pure media relations, pure content creation, pure executive ghostwriting, pure paid amplification — and pressure on agencies that try to be everything to everyone. We'd expect this trend to continue as smaller, more specialized communications firms gain ground at the expense of traditional generalists.

Healthcare consumerization keeps growing.

The shift toward consumer-direct healthcare — telehealth, direct-to-consumer therapeutics, women's health platforms, longevity clinics, mental health platforms — is not slowing. The capital flowing into these categories has stayed substantial even as overall venture capital has contracted. The customer demand is real and underserved.

The challenges remain real too — regulatory complexity, clinical risk, trust dynamics, customer acquisition costs in healthcare verticals. But the pattern of consumers wanting more direct, more transparent, more user-friendly access to healthcare services is durable, and the founders building thoughtful businesses in this space have substantial runway.

Founders are getting more strategic about capital choice.

Coming out of the venture-capital correction, more founders are explicitly thinking about whether their business is the right kind for venture capital, and choosing accordingly. This is producing more bootstrapped companies, more revenue-financed companies, more PE-backed companies, and more companies with non-traditional capital structures.

The shift is healthy. The default-to-VC era of 2014-2021 produced a lot of overcapitalized companies that should have been built differently. The current generation of founders is being more deliberate, and the resulting ecosystem is more diverse. This will keep playing out across 2026.

The creator-to-business pipeline is maturing.

A meaningful number of creators have moved beyond audience-monetization into building real product businesses — Chamberlain Coffee, Mr. Beast Burger (which had its struggles but pioneered the format), Logan Paul's Prime, MrBeast's Feastables, several beauty and wellness brands built from creator audiences. The early lessons of these businesses are being learned, and a more sophisticated playbook is emerging for how creators can build genuine product companies on top of audience.

We expect to see more of this in 2026, with better operational discipline than the earliest examples had. The creator-business model is real, the addressable market is enormous, and the founders who can execute the operational layer well — supply chain, product development, retail strategy, brand longevity — will build durable businesses.

The remote work conversation is settling.

After several years of "remote vs. office vs. hybrid" being a major debate, the actual market has settled into a stable pattern: companies make their own choices, those choices select for different kinds of employees, and the ecosystem accommodates all three modes. Companies that have committed to remote keep attracting strong remote talent. Companies that have committed to office attract employees who prefer office. Companies that have committed to hybrid get a mix.

The implication: the choice itself matters less than the consistency of the choice. Companies that keep changing their model lose talent in both directions. Companies that pick a model and stick with it can build cultures and operating systems that work. Founders setting up new companies in 2026 are increasingly making this choice deliberately at the founding moment, rather than letting it evolve under pressure.

Women-led companies in healthcare and climate are increasingly gaining capital access.

We've covered the structural funding gap for women founders extensively, but worth flagging the bright spots. Specific categories — healthcare broadly, women's health particularly, climate tech, certain consumer specialties — are seeing women founders raise at scale and at terms more comparable to male-founded companies than the aggregate numbers suggest.

This will continue. The categories where the gap has narrowed the most are the categories where the next decade of women-founded billion-dollar companies will most likely come from. Founders considering category selection should treat this as actionable information.

The economic environment will keep favoring profitability over growth.

Interest rates are unlikely to return to the near-zero levels of 2010-2021 anytime soon. The implication is that the economics of company-building will keep favoring profitable businesses over growth-at-all-costs businesses, that pure cash-burning models will keep struggling to raise, and that founders who can demonstrate paths to profitability will keep having advantages over founders who can't.

This is a continuation of a trend that started in 2022, not a new prediction. But it's worth restating because some founders are still operating on assumptions formed in the cheap-money era. Those assumptions are wrong, and operating on them produces fragile businesses.

The closing thought. Most of these patterns are not surprising to anyone paying attention. The value isn't in the prediction; it's in the discipline of naming what's true now and adjusting strategy accordingly. The founders who build the most durable businesses in the next year aren't the ones who predicted 2026 best. They're the ones who paid attention to what was already happening and built businesses that fit it.

Pay attention. Adjust. Build.

— Daluz Editorial

End of launch archive. 30 articles, ~50,000 words.