Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
theatlantic.com
Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
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Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#2I was getting insecure that my side-projects/hoped-for-businesses are things like a social news app and a podcast discovery app while Uber, SpaceX etc are changing the world but now that the software-is-eating-the-world companies are getting massacred in the stock market I feel at least some slight relief about my choices. Near-zero-marginal-cost is a magic that only pure-software (and other IP-based?) businesses have...
(Of course I'm overlooking that most new software biz that is doing well is B2B unlike my projects... but still.)
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#3“ The problem with tech today isn’t so much that software failed to eat the world, but that the most celebrated unicorns weren’t actually software companies. They have struggled to achieve liftoff because their feet are stuck in the mud of the physical world”
This sums it up nicely.
Investors got deluded enough to think that if they threw enough money at a non-software company it would magically start making software company levels of profits.
Hopefully the real economy won’t be affected too much when this bubble finally bursts.
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#4The obvious counter-example to this is Slack, a "pure-tech" company whose value has halved since IPO, and there's a similar story with Snapchat (though its value has recovered somewhat in the past year).
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#5I was getting insecure that my side-projects/hoped-for-businesses are things like a social news app and a podcast discovery app while Uber, SpaceX etc are changing the world but now that the software-is-eating-the-world companies are getting massacred in the stock market I feel at least some slight relief about my choices. Near-zero-marginal-cost is a magic that only pure-software (and other IP-based?) businesses hav…
SpaceX is real. Uber, AirBnB, WeWork and all the other 'lawbreaking as a service' and 'subsidizing transactions with massive VC' companies are not.
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#6I was getting insecure that my side-projects/hoped-for-businesses are things like a social news app and a podcast discovery app while Uber, SpaceX etc are changing the world but now that the software-is-eating-the-world companies are getting massacred in the stock market I feel at least some slight relief about my choices. Near-zero-marginal-cost is a magic that only pure-software (and other IP-based?) businesses hav…
SpaceX is real. Uber, AirBnB, WeWork and all the other 'lawbreaking as a service' and 'subsidizing transactions with massive VC' companies are not.
Taxi and hotel businesses deserved a little punch in the gut.
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#7It's an incredible mix of hubris (on the startup's part) and delusion (on the investors part) to call some of these "tech companies". Like WeWork. It's a real estate company that should be valued like a real estate company.
But somehow everyone concurred that it is, indeed, a tech company. How or why, no one bothered to ask.
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#8I was getting insecure that my side-projects/hoped-for-businesses are things like a social news app and a podcast discovery app while Uber, SpaceX etc are changing the world but now that the software-is-eating-the-world companies are getting massacred in the stock market I feel at least some slight relief about my choices. Near-zero-marginal-cost is a magic that only pure-software (and other IP-based?) businesses hav…
SpaceX is real. Uber, AirBnB, WeWork and all the other 'lawbreaking as a service' and 'subsidizing transactions with massive VC' companies are not.
Uber has a market cap of like 50 billion. It's real. It's no Apple or Google though.
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#9I was getting insecure that my side-projects/hoped-for-businesses are things like a social news app and a podcast discovery app while Uber, SpaceX etc are changing the world but now that the software-is-eating-the-world companies are getting massacred in the stock market I feel at least some slight relief about my choices. Near-zero-marginal-cost is a magic that only pure-software (and other IP-based?) businesses hav…
SpaceX is real. Uber, AirBnB, WeWork and all the other 'lawbreaking as a service' and 'subsidizing transactions with massive VC' companies are not.
I think the word 'subsidy' is kinda questionable here. (This writer's previous article used the same word to discover many companies[1])
If a company is not losing money on gross margins--if they are losing money in total 'unit economics' because the customer acquisition cost is high--does it really mean they are subsidizing usage?
An example is Casper, the mattress company. They are still selling mattresses to consumers for more than the mattresses cost to them. They are losing money on ads. If I see/hear a Casper ad, is that ad really a subsidy to me?
PS. Saw an interesting Twitter thread from Tren Griffin: "Whenever you read or hear the phrase 'losing money' you should ask yourself: what does this person mean?"[2]
1) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/say-goodby...
2) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1184981449172144128.html
Re: Today’s correction isn’t much like the dot-com bubble
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX is real. Uber, AirBnB, WeWork and all the other 'lawbreaking as a service' and 'subsidizing transactions with massive VC' companies are not.
Uber has a market cap of like 50 billion. It's real. It's no Apple or Google though.
In a conversation where “real” can be partially defined as “are they worth their market cap”, saying a company has a high market cap does little to convince me. In fact it’s the opposite: it implies a long way to fall.