More tiresome than the current state of the valley is how people react to it. I'm here since it started. I was reading on Venture Hacks and Hacker News before Y Combinator was really a thing. People where actually talking about what a Y combinator is, the Lisp one. The moment it started to hype everybody above the age of 20 should know how it would go since it is like every other hype. It starts optimistically, everybody happy that somehting is actually happening. Then the euphory spreads. Then people start to do ridiculous things. Then everybody knows that it's ridiculous but nobody knows how to get out. Then it starts to die, slowly or in a burst. That's how life is. No surprises here. But despite that most people seem to act like they have the biggest conclusion of their life: The valley is a bubble. Wow.
In business as in IT the basic rules stay the same. If it is healthy to go public with five consecutive successful quarters, then aim for that with your business. If you are editing text better spend time learning vim or emacs than the newest flashy text editor. No need to hype the explosion or burst of any hype.
Thus, I'd rather see us discussing about how to make a business work. And I'm really disappointed that Steve Blank, who always was about core marketing values, participates in such a attention seeking article.