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Comment by theoj | Hacker News Reader

All the analysts were saying similar things in 2000... the field is misunderstood, there are great transformative forces at play, you needed to subscribe to our new theories about how things work to understand everything, etc., etc. These valuations are naive projections of future growth -- most likely these firms will reach constraints on future growth.

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'99: a .com needed a team of engineers and a big expensive server to try a new idea

'11: one guy, one weekend, and a day's pay for a cloud service to try a new idea

There are legitimate fundamental differences between then and now. Think about how many people toss up a weekend project for review here on HN that would have been a huge team effort back then. I'm not saying I can see the future (like a lot of people tried to then), but it doesn't seem as hazardous this time around.

Yes, you can "try" an idea in a weekend, but it's only going to be a rough sketch, not a polished experience. You still need a team and months/years of effort to bring it up to the next level so it can get the billion dollar valuation. How many weekend projects have billion dollar valuations?

Edit: In reply to mkr-hn whose comments I cannot reply to for some reason... I believe that this thread was about a bubble and billion dollar valuations not weekend companies worth much less.

I'm not talking billion dollar valuations. I'd rather have a thousand million dollar companies than a few worth billions.

A weekend sketch can be enough to get that team.

By that logic you could say more thought had to go into ideas in the first net bubble since the costs were higher.

You're overestimating the "logic" used by the MBAs who drove the '90s dot-com bubble. The costs were higher, but cash flowed easily from VCs back then, as well.

Yes, it's all the same, but this time it's different! Really!

And every time, people believe it.

Actually, that's not exactly true. Remember the term 'irrational exuberance'? Alan Greenspan wasn't talking about how everything was peachy keen, and that was well before the implosion.

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