Starting with the good news -- as you can see from the chart below, last year, at this time, 82% of VCs were either "very concerned" or "didn't feel compelled to do deals given uncertainty" and that has totally reversed with 62% being optimistic or bullish. Unsurprisingly, with VCs being more optimistic the number of VCs who planned to increased their investment activities doubled in 2017 while the number who planned to do fewer deals went down by nearly 2/3rds. And as VCs get more bullish on the investment environment and pick up the pace of their activities a natural result is the valuations tend to hold up, which bodes will for entrepreneurs raising capital in 2017. As you can see from the chart below, very few VCs are forecasting significant price drops (2%) versus a year ago when a large number were bracing for price drops (30%). We also asked VCs to weigh in on the areas of technology that most interested them in the coming five years and the overwhelming winner was in startups focused on machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI). And as a result of this interest, you can expect an increase of activity in investments in the space in the coming year, whereas many VCs thought AR / VR and Blockchain investments would be more ripe as opportunities in the 3–5 year time horizon. Since the change in government is still fresh on people's minds we asked what VCs thought about the Trump Administration. This was anonymously conducted after the election but a couple of weeks before the inauguration and the data were very clear -- VCs don't like Trump.