"A correction may teach startups to focus less on headline numbers, more on fundamentals." To me, this is the most important sentence in the article. The amoun

"A correction may teach startups to focus less on headline numbers, more on fundamentals." To me, this is the most important sentence in the article. The amount of hand-waving in this industry is staggering. The point of a business is to create value. Most of us would interpret this as, "create value for a customer." The idea being you then capture the value you've created later on. There are hundreds... thousands of people working in and running startups that totally miss this mark. "Create value," to them, means, "get an amazing valuation." You know those stories about hyper-competitive MBA-types? There are people around us who base their own self-worth on how much money they raise compared to their peers. I have an inkling that it's becoming a bit of an epidemic. The article hits the nail on the head in that top-performing firms can't create enough of a signal to be heard over all of this "valuation aggression." How can they compete? Get more narcissistic and play the game everybody else is playing... now we have all the makings of a positive feedback loop. It's easy to forget fundamentals. I welcome a correction, and I don't think it's pessimistic to do so. It's just economic homeostasis at work. Need to negate that feedback loop at some point. The competent and well-intentioned will be the most likely to survive. It's why we argue for a free market, right? :)