"Besides the huge piles of investment dough being poured into [these companies], here’s what else [they] have in common: Little to no revenue. That does not seem to have stopped a panoply of venture and other investors from jumping in and ponying up with huge amounts of cash for the privilege of investing in several fast-growing startups, hoping to grab ahold of the next Twitter or Facebook early."
I don't know anything about Snapchat's internal operations or plans, and therefore can't really judge whether the company will eventually figure out how to make enough money from its self-destructing messages to warrant a $3.5 billion valuation today. What I DO know is that whenever investors start "jumping in and ponying up with huge amounts of cash for the privilege of investing" (in new companies with no revenues), there's a good chance that valuations are getting too optimistic -- and that never ends well.
Maybe this time things really are different, but it's hard for me not to see some parallels with the "dot-com bubble" of the late 1990's.[1]
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