You’ve all heard stories about the infamous dot-com bubble burst of the early aughts. It wasn’t pretty, a lot of people lost a lot of money – and their livelihoods to boot. There will always be talk of whether we are close, or ever could get close, to a similar situation again. I spent some time with an early employee of everything-you-can-think-of-on-demand-delivery-service… → Read More
OK, now I’m worried. Here’s why:
Lo these many years ago, in the long-gone spring of 1996, I set out to San Francisco to make my software fortune, armed with a freshly minted degree from Canada’s finest technical university. The second of the interviews I’d arranged via email–itself a radical notion, then–consisted mostly of playing Doom with my potential employers, but during the little time… → Read More
Dow Jones VentureSource released its second quarter numbers for the venture industry today, and there’s a reason they’re not dominating the headlines. They’re pretty boring: Overall investors put $8 billion into 776 deals in the US in the second quarter, a decrease of 5% in terms of invested cash and 2% in terms of deals. The median amount raised per deal was $5.2 million, up from $4.6 million a… → Read More
With valuations for tech companies going through the roof from Facebook on down to Dropbox, the endless bubble debate sees no end. Paul Kedrosky and Vivek Wadhwa recently got into it on Bloomberg West TV.
Professor Wadhwa thinks it will all end badly with Grandma losing her piggy bank. Kedrosky points out that bubbles usually occur at the tail end of a market run-up, and he predicts we have at… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Bubble. There, I said it. We’re definitely in some stage of it – whether early in the cycle or the end of it nobody can say. And it will all be fine.
People get too worked up over the word. I’m no great scholar on bubbles – I have… → Read More
I last wrote about Bitcoin less than a month ago. (If you’re one of the people who admitted in comments “I still don’t get it,” here’s a terrific and detailed explainer from The Economist.) Since then the value of Bitcoins has quadrupled—and then halved. The founder of Sweden’s Pirate Party moved all his savings into Bitcoin (which disappoints me; I had hoped they were buried on Oak Island) just… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an in-depth series exploring the ramifications of the explosion of late stage capital being raised by the Valley’s elite venture firms. For part one, go here.
In the mid-2000s when nearly every top venture capital firm was expanding to India and China, Benchmark Capital did not share its peers’ worldly ambitions. In fact, while the firm retained its Israel fund… → Read More
So here’s the reworked version of the Richter Scales “Bubble” without an image by Lane Hartwell hidden cleverly inside. My opinion, if you care, is that she shouldn’t put her stuff on Flickr if she doesn’t want it to be ganked. And, as Scoble wrote: “I think it really is lame to take pictures of people (who don’t get a cut of the profits) at parties, without being… → Read More
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