People say there is a bubble, but Marc Andreessen is right that the situation is completely different now. When we started in 1998, our whole startup was on on

People say there is a bubble, but Marc Andreessen is right that the situation is completely different now. When we started in 1998, our whole startup was on one dialup line, as a T1 was really expensive. We had to take turns downloading files. This was in San Mateo, California, not the middle of nowhere. The sysadmins once put out a request to the developers one time to physically show up and help move all of the servers. Our colo site got mad at us because we packed so many servers in that it overtaxed their air conditioning. Who buys their own servers now? Now everybody is connected. You really can expect a huge number of normal non-technical people to be able to use your website to do everyday mundane tasks like hail a cab or order food. As Marc points out, all the stupid ideas from the bubble all work now. In 2000, selling pet food online was stupid. Now people buy so much online that physical retail businesses that sell generic stuff like pet food are going out of business. Not sure if I can can communicate how utterly strange the internet was to most people in 1998. There had never been anything like it. People knew it would change everything, and they were right. It just needed a decade and a half for everyone to get network, get a client machine they liked (iPhone), and learn how to use it. I think Marc is right: this is the deployment phase of the technology. I do not think there will ever be another internet bubble. The next bubble will be in some new technology that does not work yet, like biotech or self-driving cars. Or, maybe people are now so well-informed and information is in such a tight feedback loop that there will never be that kind of bubble ever again. Bubbles come from ignorance and a slow feedback loop. People forget how hard it was to find information in the past: you literally had to know where to physically go to get it. Now some dude in rural China can find out more about the meeting schedule of subcommittees the North Dakota legislature next week while sitting on the toilet than most people in North Dakota could in 1995 without at the very least making a bunch of phone calls all the time or living in Bismarck and going to the capital ever day: http://www.legis.nd.gov/ http://www.legis.nd.gov/ I was so confident of that sentence that I guessed that to be true and only searched for the site after writing that sentence: yup, there's an app for that.