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The key thing here isn't about the fact that they are overvalued. It's more important to discuss the repercussions and what anyone is doing about it. It's not j

The key thing here isn't about the fact that they are overvalued. It's more important to discuss the repercussions and what anyone is doing about it. It's not just Sillicon Valley, it's the startup scene all over the world. How much is something really worth. Well how much is the next person willing to pay, that's really what this is all about. I've been down the road of VCs, exits etc... before and to be honest most of it is just fluff people make up, loop holes in the way things are valued, forget basic business and accounting they literally are making this up as they go. Most VCs I feel have a detrimental effect on startups, the only thing a lot of them provide is money, which isn't always what a startup needs. It doesn't matter to the VCs that they are mostly wrong, they just have to be right once. The question we need to ask here is what happens when it all crumbles down, due to the fact that all this is going on. How valuable something is ultimately depends on how many lives it improves. Whether something is valuable or not is measured by the amount of pain inflicted on society if the startup didn't exist, and ultimately if something is not needed, it wont survive anyway. The market is cruel like that, and having VC money shields entrepreneurs away from that crucial factor. All this fluffed up valuation has nothing to do with the survival of a business anyway.

charred_toast 9y ago
That's what I was trying to argue sarcastically, apparently ineffectively.
Applejinx 9y ago
I respectfully disagree. Functionalism isn't really the ultimate value: our world would look different if it was. The ultimate value is instead rather circular: how much something is worth, is how much you can make people think it's worth. As we head towards general AI, we can generalize this: how valuable something is depends on how much people and AIs/systems think it's worth. Whether it improves anything at all, is very much optional.
ethbro 9y ago
> The question we need to ask here is what happens when it all crumbles down, due to the fact that all this is going on. The problem there is that anyone riding right up until the very end has a pretty substantial return advantage over the folks who stepped off early and turtled up. Which gives a perverse incentive to stay all in, which gives everyone an incentive to keep the wheel spinning for as long as possible, which is probably why crashes only tend to happen with an external spark.

charred_toast 9y ago

That's what I was trying to argue sarcastically, apparently ineffectively.

Applejinx 9y ago

I respectfully disagree. Functionalism isn't really the ultimate value: our world would look different if it was. The ultimate value is instead rather circular: how much something is worth, is how much you can make people think it's worth. As we head towards general AI, we can generalize this: how valuable something is depends on how much people and AIs/systems think it's worth. Whether it improves anything at all, is very much optional.

ethbro 9y ago

> The question we need to ask here is what happens when it all crumbles down, due to the fact that all this is going on. The problem there is that anyone riding right up until the very end has a pretty substantial return advantage over the folks who stepped off early and turtled up. Which gives a perverse incentive to stay all in, which gives everyone an incentive to keep the wheel spinning for as long as possible, which is probably why crashes only tend to happen with an external spark.