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Who Will Be Hurt Most When the Tech Bubble Bursts?

61 points by devNoise 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago
Shouldn't that be 'bursts'? And does this mean that TC feels that we are in a bubble? And if so why?
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  "Yo" is an actual company. We are in a tech bubble.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    We're in a tech bubble when Yo IPO's. Until then I'd say that Yo managed to sell some dumb investors on a dumb idea, but that's just business as usual with investors failing to do proper due diligence when it comes to the companies they invest in. That's not rare at all, unfortunately.
    - dataker 11y ago
      It's a fallacy to assume IPOs are the only way to burst a bubble. Funds and institutional investors still hold a lot of capital that traces back to the Average Joe. The burden of risk is just not directly put on them.
      - foobarqux 11y ago
        VC is an inconsequential fraction of institutional investment.
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        What is the most significant portion of institutional investing coming from for SFBA funding? Pension funds? Hedge funds?
        foobarqux 11y ago
        > What is the most significant portion of institutional investing coming from for SFBA funding? Pension funds? Hedge funds? That's a different question. The claim that a VC investment collapse would hurt ordinary people through their pension funds is false. There may be other important effects for specific sectors or groups of people.
  - Shengbo 11y ago
    Seriously? I thought it was just a joke on that Silicon Valley show. I'd never have guessed it was real.
    - fosk 11y ago
      https://www.justyo.co/ https://www.justyo.co/ - Apparently they raised 1.5M [1] [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo
    - manigandham 11y ago
      Sadly this is a real thing and absolutely frustrating to lots of entrepreneurs building companies producing value for paying clients. Worst part is that it was claimed as some genius idea by some top VCs like Marc Andreessen (who ended up blocking me on twitter when I told him it was stupid)
    - bdcravens 11y ago
      Yo is real, Bro was the satirical take on Yo.
  - pen2l 11y ago
    There are lots of companies out there. In fact, you can right now incorporate if you've got a few hundred dollars, and some willingness to do a bit of paperwork. Heck, I'm a jackass and I have had a company for a while now. I'm a CEO. Seriously. Being an actual company is a completely meaningless thing. Now, the crazyass valuations and all that, that's a separate thing and that's where we can reasonably speculate if bubble or no bubble and such.
- Diamons 11y ago
  "Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two funding rounds within six months" That's about as open and shut as it gets as to why we're in a bubble.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    Valuation is meaningless right now. There were a couple of articles recently about how they are pumped, but that looking at the real terms of the investment - the VC value them order of magnitude less.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    I take that to mean you are arguing that we are not in a bubble? your wording is ambiguous and your example is equally (not at all) compelling either way.
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  - testguy34 11y ago
    Uber also doubled it revenue in that time.
    - Diamons 11y ago
      But still can't make a profit ? At some point the numbers have to match how much assets and profit the company is actually generating. Uber's profit is nowhere even near 5% of its valuation.
      - shalmanese 11y ago
        This fundamentally misunderstands growth businesses. Companies in growth phase pump all of their resources into sustaining growth. Once your growth tops out, you flip the switch and turn on the money spigot. Remember, profit is basically returning money back to your shareholders. If you have an investment opportunity that's 10x better than public markets (100% growth vs 10% growth), why would you ever want to return money back?
MBlume 11y ago
Question from a new-comer: after the first bubble burst, was it difficult for a solid developer to find work in the valley? How much did salaries drop?
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  As someone that was 10 years old when the first bubble burst I second this question. Who should be nervous? All tech companies or just those in the Valley with no business model aside from selling ads?
  - Saif123 11y ago
    I graduated with a Bachelors in CS from Cornell in 2001. The previous summer, I was freelancing as a Java programmer for $70/hr. By December 2002, rates had fallen to $10/hr for Java programming (at my skill level.) A couple of things: 1. The first dot com crash also co-incided with the telecom crash (Lucent, Global Crossing, etc) so you had a lot of VERY skilled technologists suddenly hit the market 2. The first doc com crash also co-incided with Americans' ill-fated experiment with whole-sale outsourcing development projects to India which is what caused the huge crash in rates. As we all know, this was not sustainable as most off-shoring projects at those bottom rates failed. Rates eventually stabilized once companies realized those rates were too good to be true. 3. A lot of developers from Big5 firms also flooded the streets. I was at Accenture -- we went from 60k employees to 28k. Rather Andersen went bankrupt entirely. So you had not only the telecom talent out of work, but also Big5 integrators. Overall, for entry-level employees, it was fine since you weren't competing for high salaries. It was more difficult for pthose set in their career who couldn't move around etc. -Saif
    - bdcravens 11y ago
      I've never seen rates that low, but again, you may have been at the lower end. I knew lots of developers who were at that end of the spectrum who were deceived by the rates being paid in 1999 into believing they had "made it". I think it's a positioning thing. If you're at a big consulting firm, it'll be tough. Companies that used to pay $200+/hr for projects will find it's better to bring in some generalists and pay them $80k/yr. During this time I was a developer in HR in travel, 9/11 hit, and I went to building web apps for health care. No issues whatsoever with work. During this time I also did some smaller projects, again, in mainstream industries: transportation/logistics, telecom, etc.
analog31 11y ago
It's probably technically wrong, but still, I can't escape from the thought that someone selling a zero revenue idea to an investor for a few million dollars is no different than someone selling a stock short. When a bubble bursts, the short sellers make out.
pesenti 11y ago
The article does not separate VCs themselves from the investors in VC funds. The picture is even better for VCs than the actual investors. Whatever happens, they are currently collecting their 2 to 2.5% management fees. Huge valuations are advantageous to them as they allow much more capital to be invested and more fees to be collected.
- birken 11y ago
  If all startups are over-priced, and we are in a bubble, that would mean it is a terrible time to be a VC. Talk to a VC, and they'll tell you they hate the world right now. More competition for deals and inflated valuations help companies, not VCs. It means VCs get less of their "top" deals and they have to pay more money from them, both bad things from a VCs perspective. And consider a VC that makes most of their money from management fees. This means LPs are literally paying the VC to lose their money. The LPs will figure it out eventually and stop investing, at which point the VC needs to find a new career. Maybe the cycle takes 5 years, but it will happen. VCs want to make good investments as much as LPs want them to.
leeleelee 11y ago
Glad to see articles like this, I've had the same point of view for awhile now. At least uber has revenue though. Lots of companies are getting funded with zero revenue (nevermind profit for now) and no clear revenue model. Crazy in my opinion.
gjvc 11y ago
the appalling grammar in this article displays zero editorial effort
birken 11y ago
> But not Mark Cuban, one of the renowned moguls in the VC world. Mark Cuban is certainly a renowned Angel investor, but not a VC. > For instance, Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two funding rounds within six months. Amazon, a public company worth ~200B billion dollars, is up 40% in value in 5 months this year. Valuations can change very quickly in technology companies, whether public or private. > This bubble is bound to burst. Ok, well I guess that settles it! > Take Uber and Airbnb for example. Both co-founders ... wealth was calculated on the basis of notional post-money valuations, figures far in excess of what these companies could actually be sold at in the market right now. Uh, says who? Both of these companies make tons and tons of money and have business models that make sense. Whether or not they are good for the world, they are certainly good businesses. What makes you so sure the valuations are wrong? All of the late-stage investments in Facebook worked out pretty well. > VCs will most likely walk away with their invested money, if not more. A VC who returns the initial fund amount (or even a small gain), over 10 years, is losing their LPs tons of money to fees and inflation. LPs will not invest in that fund again, and one bad fund has ended a lot of VC careers. Granted this is probably good for the world, but not for that VC. Saying a VC has liquidation preferences and thus they are immune from any negative consequences to a bad investment is ridiculous.
- pzxc 11y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you said, but I have a question. If liquidation preferences have such little value, why is it so common? Is it because founders for the most part accept whatever the VCs dictate, even things that benefit the VCs only slightly but still get thrown in because the VCs pretty much get their way no matter what?
  - birken 11y ago
    Liquidation preferences have value, and a lot of value, I'm saying that they just don't make VCs immune from bad consequences. I'm sure the reason they are so common is that a VC wants it, and it seems fair to the founder and is easy to toss in. Founders certainly don't accept anything the VCs dictate, and terms like this are on the table during negotiations. This is especially why as an founder you want competition from multiple VCs so you a little bit of leverage. But at the end of the day the VCs are going to want some sort of preferences over the common stock, and this is a fairly easy one to toss in. As to why the preference might not be so great for a VC, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. I make a 20k personal angel investment in a company with a 1x liquidation preference. A year later the company is tanking and sells for less than the valuation, but enough that I get all my money back. Great. I lost the opportunity cost of that 20k for one year, but nothing else. But imagine the same scenario with a VC, but let's say it was 20 million of their 100 million dollar fund. A year after they make the investment, they get the money back. But they now must return that to the LPs. The fact they got the money back quickly makes no difference to them, because they can't re-invest it. And now they now have only 80% of their fund left to try and generate a big return. Yes, getting the money back is better than not getting it back, but is wasted ammo they cannot re-use in their quest to generate a big return. And also lost in this is that many times when a company is tanking they will either go completely bankrupt or not return all the money that investors put in (see: Fab).
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noname123 11y ago
Great article. Curious if the tech bubble is gonna burst say sometime in the future, what do you think the best options would be to weather the storm? Obviously, VC-funded startup's with no cash-flow and only one or two years of funding will be the first to go (dot-com comparison: pets.com, WebVan), then next will probably be any relatively new consultancies (dot-com: Razorfish, coding schools of the late 90's that taught people for MCSE/CNAA certificates). Next in line to fall is unclear, all the hardware and network infrastructure companies suffered in dot-com (e.g., Sun, Cisco) with layoff's due to no demand anymore to buy expensive high-end servers and routers. But today with the cloud infrastructure, would AWS division, Azure or IBM be able to weather the storm? On the other hand, peeps I knew who were able to weather the storm were people who had critical domain knowledge in a stable or booming industry at the time (e.g., HPC specialists for defense contractors, Bioinformaticians working for the Human Genome Project, system developers for high frequency trading right after RegNMS). Unfortunately, cycles have also turned for these fields too and demand has matured or waned. Curious what you guys think are the next "unsexy" but potentially lucrative fields that has demand for IT workers and should yield fruit in the next 10 years that you'd angle for, if you were starting anew? Farm tech, AdTech, FinTech, personal genetics therapy, or even plain old but reliable fields like oil & gas, healthcare or e-discovery?
- TTPrograms 11y ago
  My preference generally tends towards medical - it's generally a "good" thing to be working on and we're around retirement age for the baby boomers. All the low-cost high-impact opportunities in aggregating data and personalizing treatment based on that information make it seem attractive to me for the next decade or so.
- deleted 11y ago
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seagreen 11y ago
Can't believe I'm wading into a "bubble" thread:/ Here are my thoughts. Disclaimer: I'm just some guy. epistemological confidence: low. There may be a bubble in consumer tech. There isn't a bubble in tech in general. Consumer tech is weird right now because consumers are so weak. Bob the plumber has a laptop (good!), he's using a WIMP interface (not good!), but he knows a little Excel (great!). All in all he's a reasonably empowered internet citizen with a real internet presence. He closes the lid. BLAMMO! He now has has zero internet presence under his control. Not a single thread, not a single cron job, nothing. He's lost the most basic information organization functions: "share", "receive", "do at this time", "do repeatedly", etc. Instead he has to rely on others for all those functions. These are really basic functions. Like "baby food" level. If he's so helpless his computers can't handle something as simple as "do something at 5:00 tomorrow" reliably, of course he's going to get taken advantage of. Pinterest, Dropbox, AirBNB, Slack, Evernote, Facebook, LinkedIN ... all exist because users don't have servers. If personal servers take off, consumer tech will pop. Of course, normal people aren't going own UNIX servers ever. Sandstorm though . . . that's a lot easier to set up than a Linux box. (I don't think tech in general is a bubble though. "Software is eating the world" seems entirely accurate to me.)
- Dwolb 11y ago
  Although a bit tangential to the article, you make a really good point. There has to be some room in the market for plug-n-play servers with 0-maintenance web apps that are present in the home instead of a public cloud. It'd be really tough to compete without the massive consolidation benefits of the big players. Moreover, it'd be tough to position the product because it's essentially the same service, but with privacy benefits.
  - seagreen 11y ago
    > Tangential to the article You got me. Hopefully my point is interesting regardless though -- basically that some companies like Pinterest are vulnerable in ways that others like Square aren't. > Moreover, it'd be tough to position the product because it's essentially the same service, but with privacy benefits. Oh man, I'm glad you brought this up. I think one of the only interesting insights I have here is that _the personal server stuff is totally tangential to privacy_. Personal servers are cool because they're useful and technically sweet -- I can move from querying my friend's review of a software product, to looking at his code using that software, to reading his blog posts about it, all without leaving the same datastore (on his side) or the same UI (on mine). Right now that would involve searching Acme Software Co's website, then GitHub, then Blogger, which is a plain worse process. EDIT: spelling
morgante 11y ago
This is a very lazy article. It makes a lot of broad and sweeping claims, but doesn't have any evidence to back it up. Most importantly: why is this bubble worse than the last one for employees? Employees all had stock in the dot-com bubble as well, and were equally wiped out when it burst. Personally, I think this argument is much less feverish than the last one. Unicorns might not be profitable, but they're generating substantial revenue. Uber has a crazy valuation, yes, but they're also making $10 billion a year in revenue. [1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-and-fares-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-an...
- bdcravens 11y ago
  I think (unsubstantiated as well) that less parachutes are being given out to employees this time around, and VCs have gotten smarter. Many VCs were around then, whereas I'd bet that better than 50% of those reading this thread weren't of working age when the last bubble burst.
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downandout 11y ago
It's a pretty simple situation. Zero and negative interest rates are causing enormous sums of capital to chase yield through non-traditional sources. Sand Hill Road VC's have a good pitch and connections, so they wind up with a significant portion of that capital. That capital has to go somewhere, so the VC's basically use the Stanford admissions process as a proxy for screening, and they give anyone that has been admitted and can get an app written huge amounts of this money. VC's haven't suddenly gone crazy; they simply find themselves drowning in money that they have to deploy. Some of these companies will undoubtedly be successful, as the ability to spread virally and scale the IT infrastructure to meet demand these days is absolutely unprecedented. That is the primary difference between the first "bubble" and now. It looks the same in terms of frothiness, but anything that delivers real value to people these days will spread very fast, largely for free, and may actually become profitable. Whether or not the value of the successful companies that emerge from this era will make up for the massive losses of those that fail remains to be seen. I think it's actually possible. The real losers will be the engineers, because when interest rates rise and people pull money out of these funds, all but the most promising companies (in terms of actual traction) will see their funding vanish, and millions of people (thousands of top engineers among them) will be out of work.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I found the fundamental point pretty insightful, that its going to be weird if you are a founder of some company that is saying its worth a couple of billion and you've got a few percent of the common stock equity, that "feels" like you are rich[1] as your "projected" net worth is millions. And then the bubble bursts and you aren't anymore. If you have your self identity wrapped up in that then having the bubble burst will be really hard to handle. [1] Been there done that :-)
shalmanese 11y ago
More specifically, it's departed employees. Current employees have had it drummed into them enough times that the EV of their equity stake isn't likely to be significant and they should negotiate for cash over equity. Worst comes to worst, their options go underwater but they're still highly compensated professionals with in demand talents. Founders knew the risks when they negotiated the terms of the funding round and they have nobody to blame but themselves if they got too greedy with spending. Departed employees though, have to face the choice of whether to exercise options before they expire or forego them and potentially lose out on a huge payday. They're the ones who have to put up real cash into the system for paper gains.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
I notice the "Not VCs" portion of the original title has been removed here.
beniaminmincu 11y ago
There's been a lot of talk lately about a possible tech bubble. Does the HN community think we're in one? I wanted to create a poll but keep receiving error 504. Maybe someone else could create one. I think the results would be interesting. - Update: Fixed that.
beniaminmincu 11y ago
Update: Please vote on this poll if you think we're in a tech bubble: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656

61 points by devNoise 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

Shouldn't that be 'bursts'? And does this mean that TC feels that we are in a bubble? And if so why?

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
"Yo" is an actual company. We are in a tech bubble.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  We're in a tech bubble when Yo IPO's. Until then I'd say that Yo managed to sell some dumb investors on a dumb idea, but that's just business as usual with investors failing to do proper due diligence when it comes to the companies they invest in. That's not rare at all, unfortunately.
  - dataker 11y ago
    It's a fallacy to assume IPOs are the only way to burst a bubble. Funds and institutional investors still hold a lot of capital that traces back to the Average Joe. The burden of risk is just not directly put on them.
    - foobarqux 11y ago
      VC is an inconsequential fraction of institutional investment.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        What is the most significant portion of institutional investing coming from for SFBA funding? Pension funds? Hedge funds?
        foobarqux 11y ago
        > What is the most significant portion of institutional investing coming from for SFBA funding? Pension funds? Hedge funds? That's a different question. The claim that a VC investment collapse would hurt ordinary people through their pension funds is false. There may be other important effects for specific sectors or groups of people.
- Shengbo 11y ago
  Seriously? I thought it was just a joke on that Silicon Valley show. I'd never have guessed it was real.
  - fosk 11y ago
    https://www.justyo.co/ https://www.justyo.co/ - Apparently they raised 1.5M [1] [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo
  - manigandham 11y ago
    Sadly this is a real thing and absolutely frustrating to lots of entrepreneurs building companies producing value for paying clients. Worst part is that it was claimed as some genius idea by some top VCs like Marc Andreessen (who ended up blocking me on twitter when I told him it was stupid)
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    Yo is real, Bro was the satirical take on Yo.
- pen2l 11y ago
  There are lots of companies out there. In fact, you can right now incorporate if you've got a few hundred dollars, and some willingness to do a bit of paperwork. Heck, I'm a jackass and I have had a company for a while now. I'm a CEO. Seriously. Being an actual company is a completely meaningless thing. Now, the crazyass valuations and all that, that's a separate thing and that's where we can reasonably speculate if bubble or no bubble and such.
Diamons 11y ago
"Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two funding rounds within six months" That's about as open and shut as it gets as to why we're in a bubble.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Valuation is meaningless right now. There were a couple of articles recently about how they are pumped, but that looking at the real terms of the investment - the VC value them order of magnitude less.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  I take that to mean you are arguing that we are not in a bubble? your wording is ambiguous and your example is equally (not at all) compelling either way.
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- testguy34 11y ago
  Uber also doubled it revenue in that time.
  - Diamons 11y ago
    But still can't make a profit ? At some point the numbers have to match how much assets and profit the company is actually generating. Uber's profit is nowhere even near 5% of its valuation.
    - shalmanese 11y ago
      This fundamentally misunderstands growth businesses. Companies in growth phase pump all of their resources into sustaining growth. Once your growth tops out, you flip the switch and turn on the money spigot. Remember, profit is basically returning money back to your shareholders. If you have an investment opportunity that's 10x better than public markets (100% growth vs 10% growth), why would you ever want to return money back?

MBlume 11y ago

Question from a new-comer: after the first bubble burst, was it difficult for a solid developer to find work in the valley? How much did salaries drop?

ryanSrich 11y ago
As someone that was 10 years old when the first bubble burst I second this question. Who should be nervous? All tech companies or just those in the Valley with no business model aside from selling ads?
- Saif123 11y ago
  I graduated with a Bachelors in CS from Cornell in 2001. The previous summer, I was freelancing as a Java programmer for $70/hr. By December 2002, rates had fallen to $10/hr for Java programming (at my skill level.) A couple of things: 1. The first dot com crash also co-incided with the telecom crash (Lucent, Global Crossing, etc) so you had a lot of VERY skilled technologists suddenly hit the market 2. The first doc com crash also co-incided with Americans' ill-fated experiment with whole-sale outsourcing development projects to India which is what caused the huge crash in rates. As we all know, this was not sustainable as most off-shoring projects at those bottom rates failed. Rates eventually stabilized once companies realized those rates were too good to be true. 3. A lot of developers from Big5 firms also flooded the streets. I was at Accenture -- we went from 60k employees to 28k. Rather Andersen went bankrupt entirely. So you had not only the telecom talent out of work, but also Big5 integrators. Overall, for entry-level employees, it was fine since you weren't competing for high salaries. It was more difficult for pthose set in their career who couldn't move around etc. -Saif
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    I've never seen rates that low, but again, you may have been at the lower end. I knew lots of developers who were at that end of the spectrum who were deceived by the rates being paid in 1999 into believing they had "made it". I think it's a positioning thing. If you're at a big consulting firm, it'll be tough. Companies that used to pay $200+/hr for projects will find it's better to bring in some generalists and pay them $80k/yr. During this time I was a developer in HR in travel, 9/11 hit, and I went to building web apps for health care. No issues whatsoever with work. During this time I also did some smaller projects, again, in mainstream industries: transportation/logistics, telecom, etc.

analog31 11y ago

It's probably technically wrong, but still, I can't escape from the thought that someone selling a zero revenue idea to an investor for a few million dollars is no different than someone selling a stock short. When a bubble bursts, the short sellers make out.

pesenti 11y ago

The article does not separate VCs themselves from the investors in VC funds. The picture is even better for VCs than the actual investors. Whatever happens, they are currently collecting their 2 to 2.5% management fees. Huge valuations are advantageous to them as they allow much more capital to be invested and more fees to be collected.

birken 11y ago
If all startups are over-priced, and we are in a bubble, that would mean it is a terrible time to be a VC. Talk to a VC, and they'll tell you they hate the world right now. More competition for deals and inflated valuations help companies, not VCs. It means VCs get less of their "top" deals and they have to pay more money from them, both bad things from a VCs perspective. And consider a VC that makes most of their money from management fees. This means LPs are literally paying the VC to lose their money. The LPs will figure it out eventually and stop investing, at which point the VC needs to find a new career. Maybe the cycle takes 5 years, but it will happen. VCs want to make good investments as much as LPs want them to.

leeleelee 11y ago

Glad to see articles like this, I've had the same point of view for awhile now. At least uber has revenue though. Lots of companies are getting funded with zero revenue (nevermind profit for now) and no clear revenue model. Crazy in my opinion.

gjvc 11y ago

the appalling grammar in this article displays zero editorial effort

birken 11y ago

> But not Mark Cuban, one of the renowned moguls in the VC world. Mark Cuban is certainly a renowned Angel investor, but not a VC. > For instance, Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two funding rounds within six months. Amazon, a public company worth ~200B billion dollars, is up 40% in value in 5 months this year. Valuations can change very quickly in technology companies, whether public or private. > This bubble is bound to burst. Ok, well I guess that settles it! > Take Uber and Airbnb for example. Both co-founders ... wealth was calculated on the basis of notional post-money valuations, figures far in excess of what these companies could actually be sold at in the market right now. Uh, says who? Both of these companies make tons and tons of money and have business models that make sense. Whether or not they are good for the world, they are certainly good businesses. What makes you so sure the valuations are wrong? All of the late-stage investments in Facebook worked out pretty well. > VCs will most likely walk away with their invested money, if not more. A VC who returns the initial fund amount (or even a small gain), over 10 years, is losing their LPs tons of money to fees and inflation. LPs will not invest in that fund again, and one bad fund has ended a lot of VC careers. Granted this is probably good for the world, but not for that VC. Saying a VC has liquidation preferences and thus they are immune from any negative consequences to a bad investment is ridiculous.

pzxc 11y ago
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I have a question. If liquidation preferences have such little value, why is it so common? Is it because founders for the most part accept whatever the VCs dictate, even things that benefit the VCs only slightly but still get thrown in because the VCs pretty much get their way no matter what?
- birken 11y ago
  Liquidation preferences have value, and a lot of value, I'm saying that they just don't make VCs immune from bad consequences. I'm sure the reason they are so common is that a VC wants it, and it seems fair to the founder and is easy to toss in. Founders certainly don't accept anything the VCs dictate, and terms like this are on the table during negotiations. This is especially why as an founder you want competition from multiple VCs so you a little bit of leverage. But at the end of the day the VCs are going to want some sort of preferences over the common stock, and this is a fairly easy one to toss in. As to why the preference might not be so great for a VC, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. I make a 20k personal angel investment in a company with a 1x liquidation preference. A year later the company is tanking and sells for less than the valuation, but enough that I get all my money back. Great. I lost the opportunity cost of that 20k for one year, but nothing else. But imagine the same scenario with a VC, but let's say it was 20 million of their 100 million dollar fund. A year after they make the investment, they get the money back. But they now must return that to the LPs. The fact they got the money back quickly makes no difference to them, because they can't re-invest it. And now they now have only 80% of their fund left to try and generate a big return. Yes, getting the money back is better than not getting it back, but is wasted ammo they cannot re-use in their quest to generate a big return. And also lost in this is that many times when a company is tanking they will either go completely bankrupt or not return all the money that investors put in (see: Fab).

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noname123 11y ago

Great article. Curious if the tech bubble is gonna burst say sometime in the future, what do you think the best options would be to weather the storm? Obviously, VC-funded startup's with no cash-flow and only one or two years of funding will be the first to go (dot-com comparison: pets.com, WebVan), then next will probably be any relatively new consultancies (dot-com: Razorfish, coding schools of the late 90's that taught people for MCSE/CNAA certificates). Next in line to fall is unclear, all the hardware and network infrastructure companies suffered in dot-com (e.g., Sun, Cisco) with layoff's due to no demand anymore to buy expensive high-end servers and routers. But today with the cloud infrastructure, would AWS division, Azure or IBM be able to weather the storm? On the other hand, peeps I knew who were able to weather the storm were people who had critical domain knowledge in a stable or booming industry at the time (e.g., HPC specialists for defense contractors, Bioinformaticians working for the Human Genome Project, system developers for high frequency trading right after RegNMS). Unfortunately, cycles have also turned for these fields too and demand has matured or waned. Curious what you guys think are the next "unsexy" but potentially lucrative fields that has demand for IT workers and should yield fruit in the next 10 years that you'd angle for, if you were starting anew? Farm tech, AdTech, FinTech, personal genetics therapy, or even plain old but reliable fields like oil & gas, healthcare or e-discovery?

TTPrograms 11y ago
My preference generally tends towards medical - it's generally a "good" thing to be working on and we're around retirement age for the baby boomers. All the low-cost high-impact opportunities in aggregating data and personalizing treatment based on that information make it seem attractive to me for the next decade or so.
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seagreen 11y ago

Can't believe I'm wading into a "bubble" thread:/ Here are my thoughts. Disclaimer: I'm just some guy. epistemological confidence: low. There may be a bubble in consumer tech. There isn't a bubble in tech in general. Consumer tech is weird right now because consumers are so weak. Bob the plumber has a laptop (good!), he's using a WIMP interface (not good!), but he knows a little Excel (great!). All in all he's a reasonably empowered internet citizen with a real internet presence. He closes the lid. BLAMMO! He now has has zero internet presence under his control. Not a single thread, not a single cron job, nothing. He's lost the most basic information organization functions: "share", "receive", "do at this time", "do repeatedly", etc. Instead he has to rely on others for all those functions. These are really basic functions. Like "baby food" level. If he's so helpless his computers can't handle something as simple as "do something at 5:00 tomorrow" reliably, of course he's going to get taken advantage of. Pinterest, Dropbox, AirBNB, Slack, Evernote, Facebook, LinkedIN ... all exist because users don't have servers. If personal servers take off, consumer tech will pop. Of course, normal people aren't going own UNIX servers ever. Sandstorm though . . . that's a lot easier to set up than a Linux box. (I don't think tech in general is a bubble though. "Software is eating the world" seems entirely accurate to me.)

Dwolb 11y ago
Although a bit tangential to the article, you make a really good point. There has to be some room in the market for plug-n-play servers with 0-maintenance web apps that are present in the home instead of a public cloud. It'd be really tough to compete without the massive consolidation benefits of the big players. Moreover, it'd be tough to position the product because it's essentially the same service, but with privacy benefits.
- seagreen 11y ago
  > Tangential to the article You got me. Hopefully my point is interesting regardless though -- basically that some companies like Pinterest are vulnerable in ways that others like Square aren't. > Moreover, it'd be tough to position the product because it's essentially the same service, but with privacy benefits. Oh man, I'm glad you brought this up. I think one of the only interesting insights I have here is that _the personal server stuff is totally tangential to privacy_. Personal servers are cool because they're useful and technically sweet -- I can move from querying my friend's review of a software product, to looking at his code using that software, to reading his blog posts about it, all without leaving the same datastore (on his side) or the same UI (on mine). Right now that would involve searching Acme Software Co's website, then GitHub, then Blogger, which is a plain worse process. EDIT: spelling

morgante 11y ago

This is a very lazy article. It makes a lot of broad and sweeping claims, but doesn't have any evidence to back it up. Most importantly: why is this bubble worse than the last one for employees? Employees all had stock in the dot-com bubble as well, and were equally wiped out when it burst. Personally, I think this argument is much less feverish than the last one. Unicorns might not be profitable, but they're generating substantial revenue. Uber has a crazy valuation, yes, but they're also making $10 billion a year in revenue. [1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-and-fares-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-an...

bdcravens 11y ago
I think (unsubstantiated as well) that less parachutes are being given out to employees this time around, and VCs have gotten smarter. Many VCs were around then, whereas I'd bet that better than 50% of those reading this thread weren't of working age when the last bubble burst.

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downandout 11y ago

It's a pretty simple situation. Zero and negative interest rates are causing enormous sums of capital to chase yield through non-traditional sources. Sand Hill Road VC's have a good pitch and connections, so they wind up with a significant portion of that capital. That capital has to go somewhere, so the VC's basically use the Stanford admissions process as a proxy for screening, and they give anyone that has been admitted and can get an app written huge amounts of this money. VC's haven't suddenly gone crazy; they simply find themselves drowning in money that they have to deploy. Some of these companies will undoubtedly be successful, as the ability to spread virally and scale the IT infrastructure to meet demand these days is absolutely unprecedented. That is the primary difference between the first "bubble" and now. It looks the same in terms of frothiness, but anything that delivers real value to people these days will spread very fast, largely for free, and may actually become profitable. Whether or not the value of the successful companies that emerge from this era will make up for the massive losses of those that fail remains to be seen. I think it's actually possible. The real losers will be the engineers, because when interest rates rise and people pull money out of these funds, all but the most promising companies (in terms of actual traction) will see their funding vanish, and millions of people (thousands of top engineers among them) will be out of work.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I found the fundamental point pretty insightful, that its going to be weird if you are a founder of some company that is saying its worth a couple of billion and you've got a few percent of the common stock equity, that "feels" like you are rich[1] as your "projected" net worth is millions. And then the bubble bursts and you aren't anymore. If you have your self identity wrapped up in that then having the bubble burst will be really hard to handle. [1] Been there done that :-)

shalmanese 11y ago

More specifically, it's departed employees. Current employees have had it drummed into them enough times that the EV of their equity stake isn't likely to be significant and they should negotiate for cash over equity. Worst comes to worst, their options go underwater but they're still highly compensated professionals with in demand talents. Founders knew the risks when they negotiated the terms of the funding round and they have nobody to blame but themselves if they got too greedy with spending. Departed employees though, have to face the choice of whether to exercise options before they expire or forego them and potentially lose out on a huge payday. They're the ones who have to put up real cash into the system for paper gains.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

I notice the "Not VCs" portion of the original title has been removed here.

beniaminmincu 11y ago

There's been a lot of talk lately about a possible tech bubble. Does the HN community think we're in one? I wanted to create a poll but keep receiving error 504. Maybe someone else could create one. I think the results would be interesting. - Update: Fixed that.

beniaminmincu 11y ago

Update: Please vote on this poll if you think we're in a tech bubble: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656