31–40 of 308 posts
Why is it just assumed economic downfalls and recessions should happen every 7-10 years? Self fulfilling prophecy? Bugs in the system?
As you can see from that page, the theories about what it entails and what causes it are many and varied.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the advantage of a massive skilled labor pool and investors within walking distance is a nearly insurmountable advantage. For a small company, I'd say the time/cost of hiring a few good engineers is way more than a few months rent. You'll certainly pay a respectable headhunter quite a bit.
It both helps and hurts - just yesterday Yelp admitted that the "Unicorn bubble" was hurting their profits: http://recode.net/2015/07/29/yelp-admits-the-unicorn-bubble-... For some reason it has only occurred to them now that hiring for offices in cities other than San Francisco might help them get talented developers.
They're not opening up new offices, they're looking to hire where they already have offices like New York and Phoenix.
Remote work and starting the company elsewhere are pretty easy solutions to this problem.
If all of your employees are remote, what do you show your investors, partners, board members, and creditors when they want a tour of your facility? How do you show them that you've got smart people working on hard problems? For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.
Some will probably leave, but then, they're dinosaurs anyway, and why would you want an investor who just doesn't get it?
This is a great analysis and the argument makes perfect sense in every respect. The only thing I find dubious is the idea that the bust is 2-4 years out. I think if you polled most SF commercial landlords, they would tell you that they expect most of their startup tenants to start having difficulty paying the rent in no more than 18 months. It would be interesting to see some actual data on this. After all, there's n…
Agreed, many landlords seem to feel like the trouble is a mere few months away, although often any attempt at getting them to discuss how they arrived at that conclusion gets something like "I just know it." So one wonders about the whole "wisdom of the crowds" or "herd" in this case, and whether or not they can sense something that isn't showing up in other indicators. I've been looking but other than the extensivel…
Remote work and starting the company elsewhere are pretty easy solutions to this problem.
If all of your employees are remote, what do you show your investors, partners, board members, and creditors when they want a tour of your facility? How do you show them that you've got smart people working on hard problems? For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, many landlords seem to feel like the trouble is a mere few months away, although often any attempt at getting them to discuss how they arrived at that conclusion gets something like "I just know it." So one wonders about the whole "wisdom of the crowds" or "herd" in this case, and whether or not they can sense something that isn't showing up in other indicators. I've been looking but other than the extensivel…
A lot of this may come from the belief that the economy is only being propped up by the easy money policies of the Fed, and that the Fed is going to start tightening rapidly in the fall. There's a sense that once the tightening starts, everyone will run for the exits at once, and we'll have another 2008 situation but worse.
That said, why would the Fed tighten money in the fall when we're so close to an election year? I know they hold longer terms to hopefully avoid political swings, but, it just seems like bad timing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, many landlords seem to feel like the trouble is a mere few months away, although often any attempt at getting them to discuss how they arrived at that conclusion gets something like "I just know it." So one wonders about the whole "wisdom of the crowds" or "herd" in this case, and whether or not they can sense something that isn't showing up in other indicators. I've been looking but other than the extensivel…
A lot of this may come from the belief that the economy is only being propped up by the easy money policies of the Fed, and that the Fed is going to start tightening rapidly in the fall. There's a sense that once the tightening starts, everyone will run for the exits at once, and we'll have another 2008 situation but worse.
This is a great analysis and the argument makes perfect sense in every respect. The only thing I find dubious is the idea that the bust is 2-4 years out. I think if you polled most SF commercial landlords, they would tell you that they expect most of their startup tenants to start having difficulty paying the rent in no more than 18 months. It would be interesting to see some actual data on this. After all, there's n…
Agreed, many landlords seem to feel like the trouble is a mere few months away, although often any attempt at getting them to discuss how they arrived at that conclusion gets something like "I just know it." So one wonders about the whole "wisdom of the crowds" or "herd" in this case, and whether or not they can sense something that isn't showing up in other indicators. I've been looking but other than the extensivel…
In Surowiecki's telling, if you get a room full of people to write down a guess about how many jelly beans are in a jar, the average of all the guesses will be surprisingly accurate. But if the people are allowed to yell the answers aloud, the first person who yells a guess "anchors" the guesses, and so if that first guess is radically wrong, a substantial bias is introduced into the overall distribution of guesses.
Real estate agents in a small geographic area, such as one city, often talk to each other, and therefore they generate a conventional wisdom, but each of their opinions influences everyone else's opinion. So you can get a herd action that is greatly at odds with reality.
Could anyone elaborate?
Why is it just assumed economic downfalls and recessions should happen every 7-10 years? Self fulfilling prophecy? Bugs in the system?
There are of course other cycles based on human time scales. In movie soundtracks, there is a rule that you should never insert a song 0-15 years old. It either has to be brand new, or older than 15 years.
Where does the number 15 come from? Human time scales. A half a generation. The number 5 would be too short, while 30 would be too long.