3 ms·
What's driving a lot of the idiotic investment is FOMO (fear of missing out). It is a powerful thing and can override a rational assessment of a businesses chan
by brianmcconnell 11y ago
What's driving a lot of the idiotic investment is FOMO (fear of missing out). It is a powerful thing and can override a rational assessment of a businesses chances for success.
This combined with a lack of historical perspective is dangerous. Nearly _every_ smartphone app you see had a voice/phone counterpart a few years ago (remember 777-FILM or #TAXI?), most of them are long dead, and were killed off by the same market forces that will release their latest mimics from their mortal coil.
- seiji 11y agoThis is why there's a dearth of reasonable funding these days. VCs, the bad ones (which most of them are), are flock-driven creatures. Nobody wants to step out of line, and that's a problem when something new, novel, or actually different walks in your door. The flip side of FOMO is "if nobody else is doing X, I won't do X either." Startups can get $100k in seed money by yelling on the street in soma. Startups can get $100 million by tickling andreessen in the right spot and chanting forbidden words from the before time. Nobody can seem to get $5 million to bridge the gap between living-in-coder-poverty and being able to hire a real team for more than two months.
- sjg007 11y agoYes but #TAXI never showed up.