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This is not a fucking bubble. I was working for a startup when I was 14 back in actual bubble days. There is no way that investment money is flowing from mom an
by 3pt14159 13y ago
This is not a fucking bubble. I was working for a startup when I was 14 back in actual bubble days. There is no way that investment money is flowing from mom and pop investors to startups. None. Back then there was, because VCs could unload a company with ZERO product onto the stock exchange "we're building the online parking ticket payment platform of the future" 300 million dollar valuation, no revenue, no deals, just a broken half finished application and every mom and pop doing back of the napkin math as to how much they would be worth once NYC and Toronto jumped on board their platform.
Do you know why Pinterest is worth a crap ton of money? Because they own women online. Just like Facebook owned twentysomethings online. When you control how a demographic shares information, it is trivially easy to generate revenue. Before you even both getting distracted by revenue, you focus on how far you can build out your base before you make money off of it.
I've been saying we're not in a bubble for the past 5 years, and we still arn't. If I've had a 7 digit exit for a machine learning company and I can't just walk into a VC firm and raise money for my next thing, then we arn't in a bubble.
- gaius 13y agoThere is no way that investment money is flowing from mom and pop investors to startups It is tho'. QE -> inflation -> erosion of life savings. The difference is, this time these guys don't get a choice.
- tptacek 13y agoInflation is lower today than it was in the middle of the housing bubble.
- gaius 13y agoIt is certainly reported as such. But when energy[1], travel[2] and food[3] are all going up "faster than inflation" then the official number is misleading, no? And interest rates on savings - because there is so much money sloshing around - are at historic lows. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24716146 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24716146 [2] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/20/rail-fares-rise http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/20/rail-fares-rise [3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2463143/The-cost-living-rising-faster-UK-Europe-soaring-food-energy-bills.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2463143/The-cost-liv... Deliberately linked to both the Graun and the Mail there so no political bias.
- tptacek 13y agoInflation is significantly lower than it was during the middle of the housing bubble. The factors you bring up would need to be distorting the numbers wildly and incredibly in order to make today's inflation levels a proxy for what tech stocks did to retail investors in the 1990s.
- peterjancelis 13y agoPrice inflation, yes. But the monetary base has expanded dramatically so that the price deflation from deleveraging is completely cancelled out by it. It's inflation defined as the expansion of the monetary base that the OP is talking about.
- 3pt14159 13y agoQE is two or three orders of magnitude more than VC outlay and VC outlay has not drastically expanded over the past seven years. There is no bubble.