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All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

37signals.com

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Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#101

Post by joering2 »

cletus wrote: post #98
joering2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good post, thank you. Now: > Pinterest: [...] - how do you see them dealing with copyrights of content? I don't think they will make much of profit if are willing to share $ with photography owners. The majority of value in Pinterest's user experience is that its fresh and content is created (pinned) by other users, NOT by corporations. The moment you will see every other picture a picture of an Ikea Kettle (or desk,…

> Pinterest: [...] Pinterest is not without risk but the potential is huge and it has many obvious monetization options. Risks include: - clones and insufficient network effect; - spammers/marketers creating noise; - someone does recommendation better than they do. I suspect Pinterest will either need to or should adopt a revenue sharing model with "pinners", copyright holders, etc with revenue coming from affiliate…

> Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.

didnt you just say this: Just because you don't see potential doesn't mean there isn't any in your previous post?

> As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission". I agree with you, but lets wait until all lawsuits settle or be resolved, and then see if they were forgiven. I am obviously not talking about the initial owners.

> you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now

It would be obvious Zack would say something like that, considering the service he is building. I am not sure if I like this approach anyways. While most people work on innovation the right way, there is lots of jaw dropping stuff coming up as well. On the privacy stuff, one day you may wake up with Police Drone in your backyard determining if that blue spot on your Google Maps picture was a swimming pool you haven't paid taxes for, or just a covered blocks of wood.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#102

Post by koglerjs »

cletus wrote: post #35

I've called the kneejerk "bubble" reactions "boring" [1] and I stand by that. That doesn't mean I disagree (or agree for that matter). It just means that banal perjoratives with nothing to back them up are boring . To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble. A bubble in my mind is a period of rapid growth in valuations followed by a massive devaluation on such a scale that it hinders in…

You work at Google and don't see the bubble? Interesting.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#103

Post by pg »

smacktoward wrote: post #96
pg wrote: post #24

The pieces of this argument fit together very neatly, but the problem is that they don't correspond to reality. E.g. the cloud about increased VC fundraising. In reality VCs are having a hard time fundraising: http://nvcaccess.nvca.org/index.php/topics/research-and-tren... Thus it also isn't true that the cause of higher valuations is that VCs have more money. Valuations are certainly higher, but I think the reason i…

Those data read like they're limited to VC firms big enough to join the NVCA, which requires funds to have at least one full-time employee to qualify for membership (see http://nvca.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl... ). So angel investment wouldn't be included, and (anecdotally, I know) it feels like angel investment is where a lot of the big recent money has come from.

Not among companies we've funded. Most of the money comes from VCs, even in what used to be called angel rounds. VCs' funds are just so much larger. A single VC fund is hundreds of millions. It would take a lot of angels to invest that much.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#104

Post by wisty »

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how-venture...

The bubble is not in IPOs, it's in VC. Venture capitalists having been losing money for a decade. Their General Partners are starting to cotton on, and will start pulling funding.

Yes, there's good VCs which do make a bit, and a few lucky ones, but many VCs are taking money from "bucket fillers" - institutions who are told "put X% in VC". These "bucket fillers" have to invest the money, and the top VCs already have enough cash, so it goes to less savvy VCs who invest it in the startups who couldn't get funded by the good VCs.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#105

Post by adventureful »

If it makes everybody feel better, the temporary bubble has already popped. It's over, it's just that very few people know it yet.

The Facebook IPO is timed to get out the door before the stock market falls any further. It signals the end of this micro era, just as Apple's stock at $644 was the big monster stock of this time frame (referring to the small bubble periods that the Fed generates with their monetization programs and rate manipulation).

The previous two Fed liquidity bubbles, 1997/99 and 2005/07, both had all the same trimmings.

Chin up, it's over, now comes the winter. Hope you've got your funding.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#106

Post by jsprinkles »

ErikRogneby wrote: post #82
jsprinkles wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only recruiting mail I get aggressively is from startups and Google. That's it. I hear all the time that there is a significant talent shortage, but part of me wonders whether that's a combination of people that don't want to work at Google for whatever reason and developers with families that don't want to bet on a startup. My colleagues in big iron, however, are much choosier about who they hire.

Up here in Seattle the glut of open tech/programmer positions are at Amazon. I don't know if it's growth or their "bar raiser" policy slowing down their hiring.

I imagine AWS is one big firefight, and it probably outpaced their retail business long ago. That's from outside observation, mind, and it's a guess (but an educated one).

They might be hiring at a normal rate but unable to keep up with operational demand -- which is a real pickle of a spot to be in -- or you're right, they're too choosy. I sincerely doubt there's a shortage of folks to work on Amazon and AWS.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#107

Post by tsotha »

>There just aren’t enough programmers, designers, operations people, and other warm bodies to man all the hot air balloons. So you have a predictable effect: Rapidly increasing demand for an only steadily increasing supply. Thus, inflation.

As one of those warm bodies manning a balloon, I don't mind seeing this happen. I enjoyed having a little market power during the last bubble, and I'll enjoy it this time around as well. Sure, when the bubble pops it will suck, but mostly for people trying to get into the field and not people with experience.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#108

Post by adventureful »

wisty wrote: post #104

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how-venture... The bubble is not in IPOs, it's in VC. Venture capitalists having been losing money for a decade. Their General Partners are starting to cotton on, and will start pulling funding. Yes, there's good VCs which do make a bit, and a few lucky ones, but many VCs are taking money from "bucket fillers" - institutions who are told "put X% in VC". These "bucket f…

Some of it is definitely in stocks / IPOs.

RAX had a 100 pe ratio recently. That's as high as Cisco was during the dotcom bubble.

CRM has no PE ratio at all, despite their monstrous market cap.

Amazon has a zillion PE ratio because they're not making much money any longer.

There's a very long list at this point of tech stocks with crazy valuations. When people do their anti-bubble refutes, they only list stocks like HP or EBAY or MSFT or INTC or AAPL, and they ignore the big pile of other tech stocks with massive valuations.

ZNGA and GRPN were both bubble stocks, priced to extremes, and worth nowhere near what they IPO'd at. Pandora, HomeAway, and on the list goes. I bet I can name 40 from the last three years.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#109

Post by aaronblohowiak »

Androsynth wrote: post #72
cletus wrote: post #35

I've called the kneejerk "bubble" reactions "boring" [1] and I stand by that. That doesn't mean I disagree (or agree for that matter). It just means that banal perjoratives with nothing to back them up are boring . To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble. A bubble in my mind is a period of rapid growth in valuations followed by a massive devaluation on such a scale that it hinders in…

Just because we are not in a tech-bubble doesn't mean there is no bubble. All these crazy valuations may be secondary effects from a larger, hitherto unseen bubble. -Credit/Money: We are currently printing money to finance our lifestyle here in the US. China currently holds around 3 trillion US dollars and the dollar is only worth something as long as they don't try to cash out. -Education: Something bad is happening…

> We value our health

cardio-vascular disease, number one killer in america, is largely preventable through diet and lifestyle. being overweight (actually even high-"normal") is also significantly correlated with cancer incidence. i don't have the type 2 diabetes figures offhand, but they aren't pretty.

healthcare in america is very expensive. fat, inactive americans are a part of the reason why it is expensive (diabetics cost on average $6.6k more a year than non-diabetics..)

I agree that employer-sponsored healthcare is dumb, a relic from the difficulty in recruiting people after the war.

Re: All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

#110

Post by aaronblohowiak »

jsprinkles wrote: post #49
stcredzero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble...Please, I beg of you, if you're going to jump and down and yell "bubble" at least add something to the conversation or back it up with something. Is there something broken about the hiring market? 37signals might be closer to that than Google.

The only recruiting mail I get aggressively is from startups and Google. That's it. I hear all the time that there is a significant talent shortage, but part of me wonders whether that's a combination of people that don't want to work at Google for whatever reason and developers with families that don't want to bet on a startup. My colleagues in big iron, however, are much choosier about who they hire.

To understand Google recruitment, you need to understand the incentives. They want lots of people to apply, fewer to interview, and very few hires. Effectively, they are very choosy but each step of the filtering process is incentivized for high volume on the input and low volume on the pass rate. So, you get a lot of people 'recruited' that don't get job offers.

Many startups also lament 'we only end up hiring 1 out of N people we interview..' Which makes the recruiters even more desperate to get candidates willing to go through the interview process.

Now, my personal experience (and that of my friends) is that the interview:offer rate is pretty even, which suggests that some unwanted people go on LOTS of interviews...

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