The smooth-talkers of today can code: that's great! But maybe it just helps them sell the kool-aid...?
Twitter is apparently doubling in value every few months, although it has yet to figure out a business model: does this sound reasonable?
Mark Zuckerberg is not a smooth talker who can code. The reason investors are interested in Facebook is their growth.
It makes sense for Twitter's valuation to grow proportionately with its traffic, whatever that is.
Groupon valued at 15B
Instagram: 7.5M raised, 0 revenue
Foodspotting: 3.7M raised, 0 revenue
Path: 100M offered, 0 revenue
about.me: acquired while in beta
Hipster: not yet launched, rumored to be acquired by Groupon.
Fans and tweets are obviously the currency of the new millennium.
The way you make money investing in startups is to make a lot of bets that each have a small chance of paying off big. So while I'm not saying anything about the specific companies you list (most of which I don't know anything about), a list of recent startup fundings should always include a lot (perhaps a majority) that investors will ultimately lose money on.
The problem is, you don't know which the winners will be. They usually tend to look very unpromising. If you'd made this list 5 years ago, it would have included a web site for college students, bizarrely thought to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Mark Suster: What Angel Investing & Florida Condos Have in Common http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/14/what-angel-inv...
Fred Wilson: The Dot Com Bubble Is Back http://www.secondshares.com/2010/11/18/the-dot-com-bubble-is...
The Trouble with Bubbles (talent, angel & incubators… oh my!) http://calacanis.com/2010/11/18/the-trouble-with-bubbles-tal...
Ok, not "exactly", but come on: "the majority of startup companies will end up losing money" sounds like a very bubbly thing.
In that sense, "majority of startup companies will end up losing money" is actually not a bubbly thing at all. Bubble mentality would be "most startup companies will IPO for huge valuations within a few years."
Some say the about.me acquisition has an excellent team and that's where the money went. myonepage.com is one guy. So you really gotta wonder how great that team actually was.
There's a lot of startups going crazy valuation at the moment with some serious hand waving about business models.
Bubble.
And Facebook will be one of the first to pop, I'm tempted to bet serious money on it. My Dad just joined, he's been a reliable harbinger of death for any popular website.
So I think maybe About.me is an unusual case.
I believe OnePage was a "growth first" type of startup, though I could perhaps have introduced pro accounts I don't believe it would have scaled. There is much more customer development I need to do in order to fully understand what the problem is and come up with a solution which resonates with people. I think the space is interesting and the problem is worth solving and will reward the person who does solve it, but I needed a way to try and get out of the freelance work lifestyle and fully into startups without taking funding or joining another startup, so the only real option was to build a SaaS type offering and charge from day 1. Buffer is working out well in that sense and could free my time soon. Once I reach that stage, I will need to decide whether to build Buffer further or use some of my time to rethink OnePage. Not sure which route I will take yet.
Very interesting indeed. I think something like OnePage is more suited for me after I've had some success with another idea or if indeed I had funding, but like you say even those with funding are not making much progress in that space.
I definitely agree that the about.me case was very different from the norm - the founder had previous sold a startup to AOL and worked for them for some time, so that was obviously a key factor.
Two things:
1. The key distinction: when investors invest they think "I'm gambling and I hope I win, but there's a chance I won't." When bubble people buy assets they think "I'm buying something that is guaranteed to go up in value. Free money!" If bubble people aren't buying then it isn't a bubble.
2. When sophisticated investors make wild bets in first rate companies (amazon, ebay, facebook, twitter) and those bets payoff in a big way it might lead to less sophisticated investors making wild bets in more mediocre companies. That would be "irrational exuberance" and we're (maybe) not even there yet. THEN when those bets payoff in a big way then non-investors might start buying to get some of the free money. That's the bubble.
tldr: Valuations are irrelevant. All that matters (for bubbleness) is the psychology of the buyers.
The original bubble: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
In the past couple of years, Toll and his deputies have begun analyzing European housing data to see if they hold any lessons for a maturing American housing market. Toll has been talking up the research to stock analysts and the financial press for the past year. His conclusions carry a whiff of new-paradigm thinking, but he nevertheless seems convinced that Europe's present-day reality is America's destiny. I asked Toll what our children - my kids are both under 8, I told him - would be paying when they're ready to buy. "They're going to live with us until they're 40," Toll said matter-of-factly. "And when they have their second kid, then we'll finally kick them out and make them pay for the house that we paid for. And that house will cost them 45 to 50 percent of their income."
I grew alarmed. Was he kidding? He assured me he was not. "It's all just logic," Toll said. "In Britain you pay seven times your annual income for a home; in the U.S. you pay three and a half." The British get 330 square feet, per person, in their homes; in the U.S., we get 750 square feet. Not only does Toll say he believes the next generation of buyers will be paying twice as much of their annual incomes; in terms of space, he also seems to think they're going to get only half as much. "And that average, million-dollar insane home in the burbs? It's going to be $4 million."
...
One idea that shapes the outlook of real-estate economists is the notion that cities, in a rough conceptual sense, are replacements for one another. A city is founded, and residents and industries settle there; over time, that city and its metro area might reach a population of a million residents. As demand to live there increases and the supply of good land diminishes, housing gets more expensive. But lo, another city arises nearby, where land is cheaper and jobs are plentiful. Residents can now leave the first big city, if they choose, and move to the second, smaller city. Until, that is, the second city becomes large and crowded and expensive as well. Then another city grows nearby, and so on. As pressure on prices and land builds, a new city can act as a pressure release.
It's possible that this model has broken down over the past few years. A small cadre of economists, in fact, has begun to ask whether the irrepressible inflation of home values in many coastal metro areas actually reflects a deeper logic based on the straitened land supply in these cities. Boom-time rationalists always run the risk of earning a black mark of infamy like that worn by the Yale professor Irving Fisher. (Just before the 1929 stock-market crash, Fisher declared that stocks had reached "what looks like a permanently high plateau.") And it is virtually impossible to find an economist - or a home builder, for that matter - who thinks the recent growth rates in home prices are sustainable; even the most sanguine among them predict more moderate appreciation over the long run. Yet almost without exception these thinkers, though they come from different political persuasions and even different research specialties, have attributed high home prices to zoning. Further, they have amassed a fair amount of data to support their arguments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16brothers.html?p...
People said there was irrational exuberance in 1996, but it took 5 years before the bubble actually burst, and it went up a lot in the meantime.
Ask me in 5 years, and I think then we'll be in a bubble. Now, we're just in a recovery, but not everybody knows it yet.
Me too. Ergo it could produce another bubble. But here's why I'm doubtful:
1. Wild prediction: our free money era will be over in 3 years. Last time the money got cheaper as the bubble got bigger, due to the fear of Y2K.
2. No thundering herd of new retail investors. And it wasn't just that etrade and datek opened up the stock market to thousands of novices. They were novices who had watched the market rise for decades and never really go down.
Look at the price of gas. Last time it was this high, it was february of 2008. In 4 months, gas shot up to its peak, and we all know what happened right after that.
Second dip is coming. Lots of layoffs, even in tech industry.
dogs and cats living together
the coming of Gozer
This was the mark of the housing bubble (otherwise my parents wouldnt have told me to buy a house almost immediately after I graduated college) and is why people invested in Ramps.com and petfood.com at the time of the dot com boom.
That's the type of behavior that is the mark of a bubble, we're not seeing this happen yet.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/17/graham-y-combinator-no-tec...