That doesn't make much sense. Nobody is going to decide that a few percentage points bump in interest rates is going to stop them from pursuing profit entirely.

That doesn't make much sense. Nobody is going to decide that a few percentage points bump in interest rates is going to stop them from pursuing profit entirely. Also, it's silly to compare current conditions to post-bust conditions: the market at the time of the bust was incredibly immature and people had been throwing money at ridiculous garbage just because someone had a landing page and a marketing team. We've gone through several entire generations of startups at this point. VCs are far more sophisticated than they were back then, and far more people have made in the tech / startup industry. Millennials and Zoomers are far more hedonistic than their parents and grandparents. They will gladly go into debt to fund their lifestyles rather than cancel that 8th streaming service they haven't watched in 3 months. They're so bad at managing money that we literally have services like Trim to remind them that they're being stupid with their bank accounts. We're not entering into a recession because the economy is collapsing and value has disappeared. We're entering into a recession because of a myriad of supply chain issues and because people are literally making and spending too much. While I believe that our entire monetary system is a disaster waiting to happen... we're a long way from being in a bad spot in terms of investment.