I don't think we are in a bubble overall. I lived through 1999 and this is not that. But it's possible that there is a bubble in certain "unicorn" valuations.

I don't think we are in a bubble overall. I lived through 1999 and this is not that. But it's possible that there is a bubble in certain "unicorn" valuations. The question is to what extent these unicorns are leveraged against their possibly-fictitious valuations? Can they survive a collapse of those valuations to more 'sane' levels? One way they could be leveraged is options promised to key employees, all of which would now be underwater. Of course any company that suffers a valuation collapse and has no cash on hand is toast, since they won't be able to raise on anything other than bend-over terms. So part two of my question is how much cash the unicorns have. If they have enough to last, they'll probably be okay. Edit: There are some good arguments against an overall bubble here. Slide 10 with "spending per person online" is a very powerful argument against an Internet bubble but not necessarily against all possible bubble scenarios. http://a16z.com/2015/06/15/u-s-tech-funding-whats-going-on/ http://a16z.com/2015/06/15/u-s-tech-funding-whats-going-on/ But as I said above, it's possible that there are "mini-bubbles" and that these could pop destructively. Of course there are other questions, like to what extent are VC firms exposed to China risk and to what extent will stock market losses destroy angel and VC investment? It's possible that the tech field itself is not in a bubble per se, but that it's part of a larger bubble in the global economy.