2. His comments on facebook are much more fascinating though. One thing I did not understand is where all the mobile money on facebook is coming from. Looks like it is from app installs (don’t think FB breaks it out) which in turn is created by VC funding bubble. The VC's fund because they see mobile on Facebook is taking off. Close the loop, classic bubble. So the whole scheme is likely to end pretty badly for facebook (sounds plausible). PG talked about the dot com bubble and the impact of VC funded ad buying that led to increasing market cap for yahoo until it burst
“By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"”
http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Edit: I should have guessed, people are more interested in supplying ready made narratives from the past five years for point 1 (which is not that interesting) than point 2. SMH. Some cool narratives are being provided which I heard almost verbatim at various points in the past five years that “explained” how --
1. We will have world wide inflation of epic proportions (reality: world is fighting deflation all over)
2. ECB is doing a great job compared to the fed continuing with QE2 in 2011 (reality: recession in Europe vs the US)
3. Gold will soar through the roof (reality: slump)
4. Oil prices will rise forerver (until they collapsed)
5. House prices in China will go to sky (until they stopped doing)
6. Apple was up 100% in late 2012 (until it collapsed by half six months later)
Etc etc. I would have thought some humility would have set in the “FED is printing, things are inflated to sky crowd”. Nope, just doubling down. Always stay with the narrative explain something else until we get it right ☺. At least I admit I don't know how things work :-).
Consider, there are $20 Trillion dollars of SWF’s in the world investing all over. What is the impact of these as opposed to QE?