Predictions for 2021: It’s all about inflection points

Serial entrepreneur Bob Quillin reveals 6 key disruptions that will define the new year.

By Javed Mohammed | January 2021


Podcast: Predictions for 2021

Chief Ecosystem Officer at vFuntion Bob Quillin (left), and Javed Mohammed discuss predictions for tech in 2021.

Predicting the future isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And if you don’t have tea leaves, predictions require experience, vision, creativity, and good judgment. Serial entrepreneurs seem to have pretty good track records for knowing what’s coming up . They may not get it right all the time, but they are qualified to opine on their areas of expertise.

We recently spoke to serial entrepreneur and current Chief Ecosystem Officer at vFunction Bob Quillin. With four successful startups on his résumé (including StackEngine, acquired by Oracle in 2015), we thought that he could help us make sense of 2020 and set our expectations for 2021.

Quillin believes that the future is found in inflection points, or “moments of opportunity” as he calls them. In the podcast, he shares the six inflection points he believes will shape the direction of tech in 2021:

  1. The agility imperative explodes
  2. Scale and scalability
  3. Technical debt: The bill comes due now
  4. Lift and shift experiment fails
  5. Modernization gets modern
  6. Family/life balance: Health is number one

As we head into 2021, I asked Quillin what scared or excited him about the new year. “We might see more of these things—like climate change, pandemics,” he said of the macro challenges that are likely to drive inflection points in 2021. “All those things all the way down are things to be excited about, but also things that we need to be careful to manage and watch as we go forward.”

On the Mic

Bob Quillin

Bob Quillin

Bob Quillin, Chief Ecosystem Officer, vFunction
Connect: @bobquillin, linkedin.com/in/bobquillin/

Photo: Oracle

Javed Mohammed

Javed Mohammed

Javed Mohammed is the producer and cohost of the Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @OracleSysDev.