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Comment by muench | Hacker News Reader

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Steve Blank has been saying this since 2011 when the economist hosted a debate between Blank and Ben Horowitz. All respect to Steve Blank though for his other work.

The Economist seems to have broken the link to the content on their site, but below is a video the Economist posted on Youtube and the articles posted on the personal blogs of Blank and Horowitz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfX9VLsUWwc http://www.bhorowitz.com/debating_the_tech_bubble_with_steve... https://steveblank.com/2011/06/15/the-next-bubble-dont-get-f... http://a16z.com/2011/06/17/debating-the-tech-bubble-with-ste... https://steveblank.com/2011/06/17/are-you-you-the-fool-at-th... https://steveblank.com/2011/06/22/the-internet-might-kill-us...

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Given that Steve Blank is usually correct about startups, not incorrect, wouldn't a better analogy be "even a working clock is wrong twice a day"? (Which of course is a nonsensical analogy.)

It seems like a bubble could take more than 5 years to pop. Blank makes an analogy to the housing bubble, in which housing prices grew somewhat steadily from about 1970 to a peak in 2007. Economists started claiming a bubble in the early 2000s, and housing prices after the bubble popped only went back down to about where they were in the early 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble#I...

The thing about the housing bubble is that while housing prices didn't decline to a normal level, the way that decline was prevented was through the massive injection of money into the system as whole (qualitative easing) and government loans to the largest banks.

This permanently broke the house-buying process as a whole to various degrees in that most people can no longer afford to buy a home to live in.

But also, it's plausible that the flood of money coming into VC is a part of this general flood of money - a flood that supports the US economy but not a "healthy" condition but with jobs around growing these inflated capital assets taking up a large number of well paid jobs, etc.

> is usually correct about startups, not incorrect, wouldn't a better

... phrase be "prematurely correct".

Not a good position to be in, but some people insist in telling the truth, poor asses.

("Premature antifascists" was how the US communists and sympathizers of the 1930s were designated later, when WW2 got underway. Embarrassingly enough, those people were highly agitated when the Axis powers were chasing communists and making trains run on time, but calmed down for the couple of years that the German-Soviet pact lasted. History is more fun than a barrel of monkeys, except for the bits where people get killed.)

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