I'm pretty torn between you two's viewpoints. On one hand, it's clear to me that whether or not there's direct financial value to building a super popular sit

I'm pretty torn between you two's viewpoints. On one hand, it's clear to me that whether or not there's direct financial value to building a super popular site, there's definitely societal value to products that people like. I really, really want stuff like Facebook to be worth a ton of money, because they mean something to (a lot of) people. Plus, my personal instinct is to build social websites, so if I'm gonna be a millionaire, it's going to be along the lines of something web2.0. On the other hand, it absolutely kills me that a tech company can get a valuation of 100x of their current revenue, mostly on the hope that somebody somewhere'll figure out a way to make real money on a product (and in the meantime people will make acquisitions believing that it's an inevitability). Posts like pmarca's make me feel like people believe in Facebook because if Facebook doesn't work, nothing will, and we really will be back to boring 2003 instead of exciting 2007.