I know everyone wants to talk about all these fancy economic theories about, market capture, VC funding, exponential growth etc around startups, especially SV a

I know everyone wants to talk about all these fancy economic theories about, market capture, VC funding, exponential growth etc around startups, especially SV and tech startups. I don't buy it, I see everything happening as the classic example of a bubble. Some people made a ton of money in tech through a combination of hard work, having a really great idea, and luck, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Other people saw how much money they made and the market and other piled in to try and get rich, some of them had good ideas, some of them had ideas that sounded good. This was the rising of the bubble, VCs want to get in on this, dreams of exorbitant wealth played before their eyes, they started funding tech ideas even if they didn't think they were good or there was clearly no way for the idea to actually be that profitable. But it didn't matter, this is when we started spouting things like "don't invest in a product, invest in a star team", "pivoting" began to become big, questions about actual revenue were hand waved with words like "market capture" and "penetration". Then we hit the height of the bubble, the second stage hadn't actually really produced any wildly profitable companies but other big tech companies bought them, for their engineers or platform, or data or something, at obscene valuations and so the VCs and founders still made a killing. The dream for founders and engineers went from "have a good idea that you can build something on" to "how can I get myself bought by Google", VCs meanwhile went from "will my capital work out here" to "I need to get in fast on the first rounds and some other sucker will be willing to buy it for more on the next round of funding." This is when the idea no longer mattered, what you did, how you were going to do it, none of those things mattered anymore. Move as fast as you can the faster you move the more likely you were to hit the "next big thing", in reality you were just playing the lottery, but instead of VCs buying $5 lottery tickets they were buying $5 million dollars stake in companies. Engineers rather than paying with their hard earned cash for the scratch-n-win were suckered into paying with hours of their lives in hopes of scoring big on the "being bought out jackpot". Things seemed to peak with the WeWork fiasco, ideas that were stupidly blindingly obvious, and already being done were suddenly transformed into these hot new golden geese because they used tech jargon to cover up the fact the emperor was wearing no clothes. We are now in the bubble popping for tech, corona probably wasn't the way anyone saw the bubble popping but now the contraction in capital, and the easy money drying up will show which companies had a solid good business model, which ones were iffy, and which ones were completely ludicrous. This ended up being a lot longer than intended but really sometimes you don't need fancy explanations or complex financial analysis to figure out things, sometimes plain old common sense can help you better see the forest for the trees.