If you’re raising money for your startup (or keeping an eye on your own investment options), here are a few big trends to keep in mind next year. Mark Haefale, global CIO at UBS Wealth Management, recently remarked, “the US equity surge is now in its seventh year, making it the longest bull run since World War II.”

This record year ends well north of $100 billion flowing into startups. Here are some of the contours you’ll see in the venture capital landscape of 2016.

1.   More corporate deals.

Many corporations are choosing to invest in small companies to inspire their innovation process. They get rewarded in many other ways than pure financial returns–including creating stronger suppliers, putting control levers in their industry, testing products, de-risking innovation, and engineering less expensive acquisitions.

In 2015, corporate venture participated in about one out of five deals in the United States or Europe, and one out of three deals in Asia. Founders will increasingly study how to attract and engage these deep pocketed investors. That creates greater competition for traditional financial VCs to differentiate and prove their value to entrepreneurs.

2.     More incubators and accelerators.

Corporate sponsorship is one of the many updrafts supporting the surge in incubators and accelerators. Around accelerators, early stage dollars flow more aggressively, a recent MIT study concludes. They also seem to lift their regions economically, although indirectly. There are an estimated 2,000 incubators across the country, with more opening almost weekly.

3.     Early stage competition rises for VCs.

The network of accelerators and co-working locations, combined with crowdfunding platforms,  makes new startups more visible. Add to the mix that blistering valuations in Silicon Valley motivate investors to look away from the West Coast. Many of the best known investors, like  Andreesen Horowitz and Google Ventures, say they don’t want to do early stage deals any more–small investments don’t move the needle for their huge funds.

Smaller, relatively unknown funds will thus work harder to differentiate themselves in 2016. The competition for differentiation among early stage VCs has worthy stakes.  A new Cambridge Associates report points out,

Seed and early-stage investments have accounted for the majority of investment gains in every year since 1995, suggesting that despite the deep pockets of late-stage investors, early-stage investments hold their own on an apples-to-apples basis (total gains).

4.   Number of funds continues a steady rise.

The number of funds continued to rise in 2015. The chart below from  tells the story.

Courtesy Pitchbook

With so many new funds reporting friction raising money, I expect the the new funds launched in 2016 to sit a smidge above those raised in 2015.

5. Increasing focus on investor education

Venture is performing well for investors. Still, many investors aren’t educated on the asset class and look at it with a wary eye.

The passive “set-it and forget-it” days of investing in the top 10 venture funds are finished. In 2016, family offices and wealth managers will step up to navigate the changing capital currents in order to help their clients more. Many will lean into their regional or local economy and find fantastic fits in their own backyards that weren’t there five years ago–that’s how fast the venture landscape is evolving.

6.   Smaller funds earn greater investor appreciation.

Record startup valuations and the growing corporate presence in the largest deals diminishes some of the opportunity for a big return. This has created an opportunity in the smaller side of the market that will help shape the contours of the venture landscape in 2016. In a big shift from pre-2000, when the largest ten funds grabbed the lion’s share of returns, today’s more complex venture environment means that more agile, smaller funds are posting top returns. A report from Cambridge Associates put it this way:

The widely held belief that 90% of venture industry performance is generated by just the top 10 firms (which our analysis shows was somewhat relevant pre-2000) is a catchy but unsupported claim that may lead investors to miss attractive opportunities with managers that can provide exposure to substantial value creation.

7. Diversity more desired in investment teams.

Another wind contouring the capital canyons is increasing notice of how much diversity on the investment team drives better returns. You might have picked up on the hullabaloo over venture capital icon Sir Michael Moritz mentioning that Sequoia continues to fail to find any significant senior female talent. This is indicative of their relatively impoverished network, by global opportunity standards. (For a fun new read exclusively on the outperforming returns of female money managers, check out Women of the Street by analyst M. Jones.)

The good news is, where Sequoia is failing, other funds are finding financial performance opportunities. The Future List put out by The Information and Social Capital, took 6,000 data points on 552 senior investment professionals across 71 firms to use diversity to plot which investors are best positioned to take advantage of future trends.

8. Gender diversity on founding teams increasingly associated with top performance.

This year saw First Round, a top performing early stage venture partnership, releasing the results of ten years of investing in 600 early stage founders. The number one takeaway was that female founders outperform male-only teams financially by 63%. One out of five startups seeking venture now has a female co-founder. (Learn more: See 30 Surprising Stats About Female Founders.)

9. Early and seed stage funding professionalizes further.

Whether you use a crowd sourcing platform, an angel, or an early-stage VC, your choices for early stage capital have never been better. 2016 sees no slowdown in access to early stage ammunition. For the last couple of years, about one in every five deals is in the “first capital” category.

10. The majority of new entrepreneurs are minorities.

In 2015, 41% of first-time, new entrepreneurs were non-white, a growing national trend according to Kaufman. In 2016, the majority of entrepreneurs seeking venture will be minorities–either non-white, female, or both.

By Lisa Calhoun, General Partner, Valor Ventures

That is the conclusion of a new report on executive talent by Russell Reynolds Associates, which surveyed 230 senior leaders and recruiters in Africa. Recruiters say companies are eager to recruit good hires in the region, but find that candidates with traditional management skills — such as the ability to drive change or build teams — are in short supply.

The report focused on the talent markets of Kenya and Nigeria, whose economies are growing rapidly, and SA, the continent’s most developed economy, yet the issues are common to many nations in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors note.

The issues will become more acute as more businesses expand in Africa, where gross domestic product growth is projected to strengthen to 4.5% this year and 5% next year, according to the African Economic Outlook 2015 report.

Driving the talent shortage is Africa’s dearth of high-quality business schools, according to Simon Kingston, who leads the global development practice at Russell Reynolds. In countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, many with management aspirations tend to leave for school or work abroad, and persuading them to return home for their career is a challenge, recruiters said.

In the absence of traditional management training ground, companies such as Coca-Cola, Diageo and Heineken have developed their own programmes to nurture Africa-based leaders.

McKinsey & Co trains promising young Kenyan professionals in critical thinking and quantitative analysis, as well as people skills such as co-operation and consensus-building, with an eye on developing talent for the firm, said Mutsa Chironga, a McKinsey partner based in Johannesburg.

The management-consulting firm turns away many local hires in Kenya and Nigeria who attended top local schools, Mr Chironga said, because those schools often fail to adequately prepare young people for work in global corporations. Local candidates also lack the internship or work experience and global exposure of some of their counterparts hailing from other regions, he added.

So far, global firms have relied on imported talent to fill local roles but relocating people is costly and doesn’t strengthen the local talent pipeline, said James Newlands, who leads the Americas-Africa business centre at EY.

“It’s not a sustainable solution to run your business on expat management,” Mr Newlands said.

Retaining managers in the region is difficult because compensation tends to be lower than in other global areas, the study found. In Kenya and SA, some professionals are forgoing global companies’ management-development programmes in favour of local firms, which often provide a faster path to senior ranks, according to the survey.

To provide emerging leaders with international experience and training, more multinationals are trying rotation programmes that send Africa-based talent abroad with the plan that they will return later, said Mr Newlands.

Eulicia Govender, a South African national and second-year MBA student at the University of the Witwatersrand Business School, said she plans to work abroad for a few years in financial services before ultimately returning to SA to found a for-profit enterprise with a social mission.

“I want to bring back knowledge to SA with me, and see how I can make these ideas work in the South African context,” she said.

Businesses are hoping that young Africans such as Ms Govender stick with their plan.

Some 39% of Kenyan executives, 39% of Nigerian executives and 41% of South African executives surveyed see the diaspora as a key source of leadership talent over the next five to 10 years, yet only 32%, 29% and 13% of them felt local talent would be willing to return home.

By Lindsay Gellman