Navigating Uncertainty: Who Really Sees the Future?

What happens when you get 60 accountants + tech founders into one hotel room in a quite town in Colorado? You get kicked out as soon as EDM DJ Will Lopez arrives!😂 Last month our partner Michel Ly hosted a “small” party with two rock star founders Toni Witt @ Sweet + Anderson Petergeorge @ Quanto. Together they had some unforgettable moments while attending Bridging the Gap (BTG).

For our other partners who didn’t make BTG, summer vibes were still in full swing —family time, slower mornings, and the kind of moments you only get when you pause long enough to notice. Moving a little slower this season clears the mind—and makes space for new ideas to surface.

As a reminder, at Accounting Fintech Ventures, we support early stage companies in the accounting tech and fintech space. We provide advisory services to startups and provide investment management services to funds focused on the accounting tech and fintech arenas.

During this last month of summer, my mind has been ignited with ideas of what the future could be. The truth is, I’m not sure even the greatest technology minds of our generation were able to predict the outcomes of their own products. There seems to be a common thread here, so I looked deeper.

Some recent Acquired podcast episodes reminded me that Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and so many others never set out to build what became massive platforms. Facebook wasn’t conceived as the global social graph; Google started as a way to organize academic papers. Their genius wasn’t in clairvoyance, but in responsiveness. They knew the terrain—problems worth solving—not the destination. They had passion, curiosity, and a willingness to listen to market signals.

Sam Altman echoed this in a recent interview with Cleo Abram where he admitted he really didn’t know where AI would go. He always wanted to work on it, but if you asked him ten years ago if today’s breakthroughs were possible, his answer would have been no. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” has voiced similar uncertainty—warning in his Nobel Prize speech and on Diary of a CEO that even the pioneers don’t fully know where this is heading.

So maybe the real definition of a visionary isn’t someone who sees the future clearly. It’s someone who can navigate uncertainty with persistence, passion, and market sensitivity. They’re not authors of a pre-written script; they’re explorers with great compasses.

The CPA.com 2025 AI in Accounting Report makes this shift clear in our profession. Firms aren’t just plugging in new tools; they’re rearchitecting workflows, talent models, and services around what AI makes possible. EY recently wrote about agentic AI in tax, showing how autonomous systems could reshape compliance functions. These aren’t hypotheticals anymore—they’re signals that the profession is entering its own “fog of innovation,” where clarity only emerges step by step.

In a recent huddle with founders, we discussed how currently our brains take unstructured data, make sense of it, and then apply it into programs. The future? AI itself will take unstructured data and create structure without us. That will be full autonomy—a leap we can’t fully picture yet, but can already sense.

A big thank you to our LP community—from firm owners leaning into AI education, to family offices asking the tough questions about risk and adoption.

Shoutout to one of our LPs, Randy Crabtree, who puts on one of the most meaningful conferences of the year in the accounting industry: Bridging the Gap.

And to our founders, who keep us showing up—thank you for sponsoring the pre-party event at Bridging the Gap. It was a night we’ll always laugh about.

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