We are in a Bubble

I have the same thoughts exactly. I was a junior at university when the last bubble burst so i have no idea what it was like. Currently i have been running my startup after quitting my job for almost a year and we are doing OK but this talk of bubble worries me because i dont know what to expect.

Will it only effect startups that are social types that dont exactly generate revenue but through capital injection( which i assume is what will evaporate the fastest during a pop) have the potential to become massive such as instagram etc or will it also effect the startups that actually do turn up a profit every month so that the founders can eat and re-invest their money back in the business.

When i try to draw parallels from 2000 from a technology stand point, i assume the bubble pop killed the tech industry because getting a startup of the ground required tons of cash, it didnt matter whether you could charge from day one or it was a great idea but needed to get to scale before you could make money, you still needed to buy servers, hosting and your development team was larger because there were no frameworks etc .. basically there was alot to spend before you could turn a profit, so when capital dried up so did the ability to start a new company or even continue to run an existing one. As a founder, unless you were already wealthy you could not bootstrap

Now with amazon, great frameworks that cut down development time many times over and other things of the like, founders can take savings of 10-15k and start a business that can return that investment maybe after 4-5 months and start making profit soon after.

The question is, do these kinds of startups still survive, could this be the differentiating factor this time if the bubble pops.

Maybe after the bubble pops we wont get those massive social startups that require millions of dollars worth of injection for a while but instead get many smaller bootstrapped business types that take a small investment and return a profit monthly that eventually grow into large business. Its slower but similar to more traditional businesses. If this is the case then i feel its OK, at least if we find an area there people still have a need and technology solves that need we can still make a living doing our own startup and work on things we love.

Im also interested because we are bootstrapped and we have managed to get our small startup to give us back about 60% of our salary that we used to get at our 9-5. its enough to live of and not make us wonder where we are going to get our next dinner, however we are thinking of starting something new because we feel there is a ceiling to what we can achieve with our current startup and its important for us to decide what startup to do next if we actually are heading into a bubble that may pop midway through our next project, 1,2 maybe 3 years down the line

What do you guys think the tech scene will look like in the valley and possibly around the world if such an event would occur again ?

Sorry for the long post but i thought it important to get ideas from the HN community on this topic.

It's probably going to go back and forth in cycles between overvalued and undervalued for a long time because no one really knows what the market value of an intangible digital asset is. Can anyone explain how much money the data in the Facebook databases are worth?

For a further personal exercise I would recommend reading the first half of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which gives some insight into early economic bubbles. I think the fact that things have changed so much since it was written allows you to easily see the things that don't change, namely the snowball effect of hype (madness of crowds).

Edit: The Tulip Bubble that meric mentioned is in the book. Really insightful stuff.