Someone please make the bubble die | Hacker News Reader

Someone please make the bubble die

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26 pointsrams27 comments

It's hard to find a line of reasoning in this to refute. Always a bad sign.

Eh, the line about 'forgettable names' is pretty easy to refute. Anything successful on the net has a strange name. Yahoo is the canonical example. Heck they even made commercials about it. I'm sure Viaweb was easier to remember than interactivestorebuilder.com would have been. All the names of startups on Techcrunch seem pretty memorable to me. Heck I remembered buxfer like a month after I first read about it, without even having been to their site before.

I think he had one decent point in among all the confusing incoherent thoughts... the 'do stupid shit faster!' part. I for one, welcome any web application that makes the 'stupid shit' in my life easier to get out of the way, so I can focus on shit of the non-stupid variety.

So you are saying that because the names don't matter, there is no bubble?

I'm not sure its a bad sign per se. It should just be a wakeup call back to reality (a good thing!). I (temporarily) bailed on the startup world for graduate school because most of it was uninteresting, unproductive, cutesy cruft. It may take some time, but eventually I think others will get bored with the web 2.0 gravy train and get back to real, productive innovation. Put simply, next time I talk to a VC it won't be any novelty widget or web technology, it will be about something that will make the world a better place. If meeting that criteria makes it Something 3.0, so be it.

Clearly you interpreted the grandparent comment differently than I did. :-)

Ha! I just re-read it. Good call. I totally misread pg's comment, but still stand by the points I made.

I'm not sure the point of this rant. Let me summarize what I got out of this:

This author thinks we're in a bubble because: 1) the startups having unique names 2) you can't change text size of widgets 3) nobody codes as well as he does

I wasn't convinced he was right until he starting swearing... then I was sure he knew what he was talking about.

He complains about shitty over-hyped products that can be easily copied by a 14-year old over a weekend. He complains about sea of companies that make stuff that nobody wants because nobody is paying for it.

One thing for sure: over half of "products" announced on TechCrunch is less work than a typical graduate CS class project at UT (Texas).

Downmod me all you want, but Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.

You gotta give them credit for scaling and marketing themselves.

It reminds me of an urban legend I heard about a Porsche dealer who held a "buy one car, get another free" promotion, thinking he'd make it up on volume.

People who introduce the crufty products that the author rightly complains about focus too much on short term trends. Two prescriptions that help: 1) Read "Fooled By Randomness". 2) Avoid TechCrunch et al. like the plague.

tell that to YouTube, del.icio.us, flickr

Nothing of what I have written above applies to these 3. Neither can be written by a 14 year old over a weekend, YouTube is a lot of tech to handle. Flickr never nad problems with users paying for their services.

Finally, del.icio.us does not even belong to a group of companies this thread is all about (over-hyped startups with venture millions, producing crap) - it was a personal part-time pet project of a guy who didn't live in the Valley, didn't ask for millions for coding it. He wasn't even a professional programmer as far as I know.

In my view, you can be either a technology company (YouTube) or a revenue company (MySpace). Or both (Google).

Overwhelming number of Web 2.0 startups are neither.

Twitter is a joke. And FaceBook is not a "six billion dollar company". And "millions of users" who are not paying for your services do not translate into sustainable business just because of the "millions" word.

Revenue is revenue. I don't know who's saying Facebook is worth $6 billion, and I think it's overhyped too, but I'll bet Facebook is cashflow positive. Twitter's a joke? If it never becomes more than it is, then quite possibly. But perhaps its engineers plan for more than what it is today. And quite possibly, surrounding technology (cell phones, what-have-you) will advance in ways that will make what Twitter is suggesting more interesting.

Overhyping != a bubble. Companies making stuff no one wants != a bubble.

A "bubble" refers to a stock market bubble. We are not in a stock market bubble. If startups make things people don't want, then they may fail. Or better, they'll learn from their mistakes, improve themselves, and make things people want.

Bubbles don't require a "stock market", only a market and some sort of insulation from bad choices for a while.

I have to heartily disagree. A bubble is something that can pop (hence the analogy). There is nothing in this current situation that can pop. You don't need VC or angels. If you fail, you can always give up and go get a job.

The market could crash, but the state of the stock market is wholly unrelated to the state of the internet industry at this here particular time.

Are you disagreeing? I wasn't saying that the current situation is or isn't a bubble (I'll only know that in retrospect... :]); rather, I was saying that bubbles can form in markets other than stock markets. One of the most famous was the tulip bubble, in which the involvement of stock markets lagged the formation of the bubble by some time.

I thought this was hilariously cynical. Of course, I might just be in a cynical mood reading this at my day job.

Completely unrelated observation. If you want to really offend someone try to be specific. Like when my friend called me a jerk I used to brush it off, but this one girl I met recently called me a <insert-my-favorite-food> eating jerk. And you know what. It worked :( But still this one just seems to be funny.

"Look, you little Bay Area-dwelling, public transportation-using, podcatching, bespectacled too-cool-for-cool circlejerk pricks: calm the fuck down. Chill the fuck out and read a computer science textbook."

Probably because I do read Computer Science text books. Meh..I am gonna brush it off.

(Just to set the balance, I have also been called a God aside being called a jerk. So don't judge me yet)

You can ignore it... you can join it... or you can whine about it.

Which one's the least productive?

Or you can change it by building more compelling products, which is what the author (in his own, angry-to-the-point-that-it-hurts-his-writing kind of way) is wishing for.

"Pick up a book on economics, journalism, the environment, history, etc."

Er, no. Get a job. Do something in a living breathing organism called a "business". Learning x 1000.

"seems like it would be easy to spook Angel investors"

Don't need no stinkin' angel. It's 2007. It takes about $500, a little knowledge, and a lot of sweat to build an IT business now. Find a customer, an angel who doesn't get equity or pay back.

if he's right isn't this a good thing? most of the startups that are successful now, started during (or close to) the dotbomb or some other economic crisis/recession (I think both MS and Apple did the same)...

Not bad -- or off base -- until he goes all "I'm smarter than you" at end.

Great rant. I'm just a little reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water. This is a GREAT TIME to be in the IT business if you know what you're doing, understand your market, really care about your customers, and are able to implement modern technology where it's needed in a sensible way.

We already know lots of lame start-ups will get washed away. Let's wish those people better success on their second try.

I like swearing. I swear all the time. Fuck is the most elegant and multi-useful word universally known. In fact, I love swearing so much I even swear at my own grandmother. But it was funny.

The tone and voice of the author doesn't carry well. It's not funny. It's not satirical. Just a guy swearing about doom and gloom. Uncov, Flocksucks, and even Valleywag, this is not.

Someone please make this meme die. We are NOT IN A BUBBLE. Most of the country is not in good economic condition. The stock market is rocky, and is not inflated. There no parallels to 1999 here. VC investment != a bubble. Say it to yourself a few times.

It is always good to be challenged with the 'we are in a bubble' postings simply because a bubble can't happen so long as people are willing and able to practically evaluate the functionality of their own technologies. At least, that's what I believe Buffett would say.

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