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Comment by idkwhoiam | Hacker News Reader

IMO this is .com bubble v2 in the making

Edit: grammar

Why do you say that?

Pets.com, the poster child of dotcom era excess, IPO'd at a $290 million valuation, and never had a market cap that exceeded $1 billion.

Today there three or four companies in the EV space alone that are either outright universally known frauds (Nikola) or where senior management has told investors that they will run out of money before ever making a product. Yet they all have billion dollar+ market caps (Workhorse, Lordstown, etc...)

Rivian, Tesla, and Lucid do have products but are worth $1.3 trillion together. What do you call that if not insanity?

What do public EV markets have to do with private PaaS VC investments?

You would have a case if Vercel has no revenue, or no chance of becoming profitable. I don't know their numbers, and I'm sure the multiple is high, but relating this to EVs is a non-sequitur.

EVs are also venture funded startups, and the excess is more obvious there than in an obscure PaaS company. But still, two $100 million rounds within months of each other, as Vercel has done, is pretty outside of the norm.

Fixation on vehicle companies isn't really relevant here.

It's totally relevant. Valuation for pretty much everything speculative went up many times over just the past two years.

Startup valuation is no different. Very unlikely to be a new normal, but a brief period of hysteria as has happened many times in history.

Not speaking to the Vercel case by any means... Not aware of their prospects or otherwise that justifies this value.

We'll pretty soon see those who have been swimming naked get crushed when the tide goes out. Likely happening around now/start of next year with Fed shift to tightening, and effect of 2020/21 transfer payments waning.

Vast majority of tech valued at 100x sales have no justification as an investment. It's dotcom 2.0, but with more legitimate businesses that are simply far overvalued.

EV is just the most obvious and visible manifestation of this. Rivian at 150B value with 0 sales and many competitors. You have to be pretty delusional to invest in things like this and expect not to lose big. And best case you may 2 or 3x many years from now? What kind of risk/reward tradeoff is that?

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