In Silicon Valley, Partying Like It’s 1999 Again

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/technology/in-silicon-valley-partying-like-its-1999-again.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimesbusiness&_r=0

by mpg33 • 13 years ago

91 90 13 years ago

nytimes.com

brosco45• 13 years ago

And soon, 2000/2001 again. People never learn.

eruditely• 13 years ago

And soon to 2026 again we will toast.

bdcravens3• 13 years ago

Or maybe they do. Do you think the millionaires made in 1998 and 1999 were freaked out in 2000? (Assuming they just deposited the money) What you can learn from a bubble: it comes, it bursts, and in the meanwhile, you can generate enough wealth that it's not an issue. Arguments about the effect of bubbles is a macroeconomic debate; decision to go for a big paycheck is a microeconomic one and only tangential.

saool• 13 years ago

money changing hands != generating wealth

andyl• 13 years ago

Wonderful marketing hyperbole.

rmason• 13 years ago

The media can't help themselves in writing another bubble story. They keep looking and looking yet they missed all the signs of the 1999 bubble completely.

Is it a bit frothy? Yes, but the correction that is coming will not be nearly as severe. Those bulked up startups will crash if cut off from future funding.

But a larger majority will just hunker down and bootstrap their way through it. That wasn't an option for most in 1999.

icn2• 13 years ago

It looks not like 1999 at all. In 1999 one can easily find a programming job only knowing html. Today It seems that tons of graduates knowing very well Big O complexities, all kinds of cs fundamental algorithms still need to compete for a job.

logn2• 13 years ago

Now you need to know html and 6-weeks worth of programming basics. The main reason experienced people compete so hard for jobs is that companies won't hire remotely and people don't want to move, and because founders and VCs don't pay good salaries. Still, finding a good job is fairly easy if you're talented.

bonemachine• 13 years ago

But the point is that in '99 it was also fairly easy even if you were manifestly untalented.

nfoz• 13 years ago

Now you just have to be talented at producing garbage!

ringdabell• 13 years ago

perhaps, but you have a ton of people going through 10 week crash course "learn how to program" courses and pulling down decent jr dev jobs.

there's a whole cottage industry around this, see: starterleague.com

basic html+css with some passing familiarity with Rails/Jquery and some common libraries = 80K, $100/hour programmer bro.

not too far off from '99...

jurassic2• 13 years ago

Meh, there is a wide variety of rigor and selectivity in these programs. While I admit there are a lot of junk grads from junk programs right now, hiring from the top third/half of the more selective bootcamp programs (e.g. App Academy which requires no upfront payment, ~10% acceptance rate, 10% attrition, taught by an ex-googler) and you'll find people who are ready to start implementing features and adding value to your business without a lot of handholding. You'll find people from other technical backgrounds, who wanted to learn web development in an intensive environment. You'll find people from very good universities. You'll find people who have demonstrated ability to work long hours and ramp up quickly. And they're the kind of people who believe enough in themselves to go all-in, often quitting jobs and moving across the country with their life savings to learn how to build things for the web.

Bootcampers lack the mathematical rigor of fresh CS grads, but most of the value in web products doesn't come from writing proofs or optimizing algorithms. And if bootcampers are creating value, I don't see why they shouldn't be compensated appropriately. The market seems to agree, since these people are getting hired.

encoderer• 13 years ago

Define "ton".

It's not as many as you think. I'd guess it's measured in hundreds? Possibly low-thousands? And not everybody in these courses is a beginner, and they're not all trying land a software engineering job. Of the 3 people I personally know who've enrolled at App Academy et al, 1 is an experienced BE developer who wanted an accelerated immersion class in app development, 1 is a product manager who wants to pick up more programming skills to make him a better startup founder, and one legitimately was a beginner who wanted to land a software engineering job. So far, a couple months after successful completion, she hasn't had any offers yet.

sgloutnikov• 13 years ago

"YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH Subscribe to continue reading"

Come on NYT...

eob• 13 years ago

You want them to work for you for free?

tayk• 13 years ago

'New Incognito Window'

asimjalis• 13 years ago

If it was 1999 NYT would be giving away its content for free.

nswanberg• 13 years ago

It's sad that the only numbers appearing in this article have dollar signs attached to them and that the quotes are all about people's feelings.

This one has some numbers without dollar signs (and of course some with): http://gigaom.com/2013/10/18/how-has-vc-funding-changed-sinc...

pedalpete2• 13 years ago

Great link, the thing is, VC dollars or number of VC deals is no longer the predictor it was in 1999. So many businesses can build and last longer without VC funding that by the time these businesses are getting investments from VCs, they are already much further along the curve.

So there likely won't be a VC bust like before, we need to start using a different metric, unless all we are concerned about is the health of VC.

001sky3• 13 years ago

VCs make $billion dollar companies. Billion dollar companies make bubbles. While I sort of agree with you that startups don't need a billion in capital, thats sort of beside the point. Bubbles need billions in capital, and bubbles need VCs. Or, at least thats another way to look at it. I dont think a single one of the ~40 billion dollar exits in the past decade has not had VC to goose the valuation prior to it going public (if not for absolute capital needs).

coldtea• 13 years ago

Here's a link to a text I think it's worth it (and relevant).

It's a funny account of some 2005 hazy "Open Media" event, written by a photojournalist called Jim Lowne and titled "Party like it's 1999".

Sadly the post is not up on his website anymore, lost to some restructure:

http://pastebin.com/4qvDX9hd

patmcguire• 13 years ago

If they're right, it means the The New York Times has successfully predicted eight of the last two tech bubbles.

itcmcgrath• 13 years ago

That just broke my head. 8 of the last 2?

CDRdude• 13 years ago

That would mean that the New York times has predicted a new tech bubble 8 times, and will be correct 2 times if this is a new bubble.

desireco422• 13 years ago

Excellent :)

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

Great bumper sticker in 2001 was "God, one more bubble, this time I'll SELL."

Some interesting analysis I read was take $10K during the period of 1995 - 2000, invest it in tech stocks, sell them when it hit $15K, and invest $10K again in stocks, sell when it hit $15K, rinse and repeat. When the bubble bursts you lose all of your $10K investment, but in the last bubble you had put aside $25K in 'profits.' The point of the analysis was that sticking to goals and running your investing based on those goals was more effective in a bubble than 'going long' (as I did btw) The other key was that you did not try to 'amplify' your risk by selling and then investing all of the money you had ($15K after the first round) because that left money at risk. The money you pulled out had to go somewhere that was really solid (like an FDIC insured savings account or CD).

Perhaps I'll get a chance to try that strategy this round.

deelowe2• 13 years ago

This is pretty much just dollar cost averaging, right?

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

If I am reading you right, the strategy you're describing is known as Value Averaging.

area51org3• 13 years ago

Exactly right. This looks nothing like the '90s, and I wish to god people (and media outlets) would stop crying, "bubble!"

If you honestly think the current Silicon Valley looks anything like 1999, you don't understand what happened in 1999.

7Figures2Commas• 13 years ago

If you honestly think the current Silicon Valley looks anything like 1999, you don't understand what happened in 1999.

When you chew gum, you don't blow the exact same bubble every time, do you? Some are bigger, some are smaller. Some pop sooner, some last longer. Some make more of a mess when they pop, some make less of a mess when they pop.

I participated in the tail end of the first bubble, and while there are absolutely differences, some meaningful, I think it takes some effort to ignore the many meaningful similarities.

adventured• 13 years ago

Well that all depends on how long Yellen runs the QE 'infinity' program.

So long as money remains this cheap, the stock market will keep expanding until there's a necessary crash. Money is chasing risk, inflating assets accordingly.

The last few quarters have delivered the first indications, in my opinion, of a repeat of the excesses of the 1990s. The higher this stock market goes without fundamentals directly supporting it, the more frothy parts of the tech sector are likely to get.

Over 90% of the gains in the broad stock market the last two years have been from pure multiple expansion. Another year of this and it will be a full blown bubble across the board, and by that point what will Snapchat (or the next craze) be worth? $8 billion? $20 billion? The only thing left at that point will be a massive implosion on the other side.

Where are stocks like LinkedIn going from here? $50 billion (50 times sales)? Is Twitter worth $40 billion (70 times sales)? Is Tesla worth $30 billion? Is Netflix worth $35 billion? Is Amazon worth more than Walmart? Should Google have a 40 pe ratio, while growing earnings at 10-12%?

I say the party is nearly over, there's no upside left looking out several years that doesn't require a bubble.

debt4• 13 years ago

Meh. Everything is moving online. Hype or not, that's what's going on. Snapchat? Well, kids don't watch TV anymore, but those TV ad dollars still exist. There's millions of kids and billions of dollars. Where is that ad money going to go? It's going to go into ad platforms provided by Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube and on and on and away from TBS and CBS and AMC, etc.

Across the board, the money is moving laterally from one offline component of some infrastructure to it's online-only equivalent. It's happening now, and it's happening fast.

The hype is real.

sard420• 13 years ago

Yes, yet youtube is still advertising horror movies to my 2 year old watching kids videos. Other than Rockenblox I've barely seen a ad that is 'kid' related on kids videos.

debt4• 13 years ago

By kids I meant teens.

Regardless, I've noticed the same thing on YouTube, they really need to fix that. Why are you running an add for car insurance on a video obviously geared towards children? I mean, why are you advertising at all on videos clearly geared towards children.

ghaff• 13 years ago

Well, kids don't watch TV anymore, but those TV ad dollars still exist.

I don't completely disagree but try this statement on for size:

"Well, people don't use classified ads any longer, but those classified ad dollars still exist."

Actually they don't. Some of those dollars have gone to other intermediaries like eBay but most of them just aren't in the ad ecosystem any longer. Money does indeed move to new platforms but there's no rule that says it has to move on a 1:1 basis and, in the case of advertising, the evidence so far suggests that a lot of the spend just goes away.

nazgulnarsil• 13 years ago

I will pay dollars right now for a curated classified ad experience that isn't the wasteland of CL.

jsnk• 13 years ago

"I got dough to blow, but I wanna blow it right" - Drake

Big advertising budget won't go to internet simply because TV isn't attractive anymore.

socillion• 13 years ago

By "kids don't watch TV anymore", I assume you're referring to them only watching TV for an average of 20-25 hours per week, or 3-4 hours per day?

robbyking• 13 years ago

I agree. There are also many more web users than there were then.

I worked at a couple different start-ups in the 90's, and a lot of the trouble we faced was the result of our core audience either not having internet access or not being willing to enter their credit card information online.

aryastark• 13 years ago

Entering credit cards into a '90s site was a scary thing. I saw what a number of sites did. Plaintext files with hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers. Just sitting there. Waiting for some random script kiddie to come along, crack a few Unix passwords, and ruin a few lives.

Ologn• 13 years ago

Meh. Everything is moving online.

Quote - "Almost everything is moving on-line."

Year - 1999

Author - Jay Conrad Levinson

Book name - Mastering Guerrilla Marketing: 100 Profit-producing Insights You Can Take to the Bank

Page # of quote - page 186

Publisher - Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Google Books working(?) link - http://books.google.com/books?id=8f69VffjDJMC&lpg=PA186&dq=%...

I heard the same thing the last time around. Before the 2000 crash. Before the 2008 crash. It's different though this time, right?

desireco422• 13 years ago

But it is still moving and evolving online :) it wasn't wrong then and it isn't wrong now. That doesn't mean it will be linear all the way.

debt4• 13 years ago

iPhone.

johnrob• 13 years ago

Being early is the same as being wrong, with one exception: if you're early it means the concept will indeed be correct later on. I think "Everything is moving online" was early, not wrong.

eli_gottlieb• 13 years ago

The hype is real.

Time to sell!

logn2• 13 years ago

In the dot-com bust, one big problem was that with IPOs average folks were dumping their life savings in companies with no solid business and they got burned. Right now, that's not happening much. Crowd-funding might change that but hopefully it doesn't cause another bubble burst.

kaeluka• 13 years ago

"YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH."

psbp• 13 years ago

Google the title.

WasimBhai• 13 years ago

Sitting here in Pakistan, this scares me. I remember back at the start of 2000s' when the bubble had busted, and Pakistani software industry which is largely doing work that has been out-sourced, going more or less dead. Really talented engineers were unable to find jobs, and the whole CS boom which had reached here too, died down. Now there are so many jobs, and not enough kids which is making universities induct even more students.

In between all this, this talk of bubble busting literally freaks me out. When God forbid it happens, it will leave deeper scars than the 2000 one with many a stable careers coming to a sudden halt, and along with them their families.

dclusin2• 13 years ago

I was a teenager during the the dot-com bust in the Silicon Valley (Palo Alto/Stanford to be precise). Even PhD's and extremely driven & accomplished people could not find jobs. They simply weren't there. In the event that there is a bubble in start up investing I don't think that it will be as bad as it was when and if it deflates. The primary reason I think this is because the amount of demand for skilled software/hardware workers has grown to such huge & global proportions that it is not possible for VC's to affect it meaningfully anymore. Although I guess you could have said the same thing about housing in the U.S. back in the 2000s.

jurassic2• 13 years ago

I know things were terrible for everyone during the dot bomb era, but just wanted to say that PhD holders often have a hard time finding the right position even in good times. They are highly specialized and believe they should command a high salary, but employers are resistant to paying a large premium unless their particular expertise serves their business need. Since PhD theses are by their nature esoteric, this leads to an unfortunate mismatch in expectations.

baudehlo• 13 years ago

Even in 2000 it wasn't just about VCs. Big old companies put a lot of effort and manpower into new tech too. Those long established companies rolled back projects at the same time as the crash, funding was pulled from technology departments, and all technology people suffered due to the bust. I was out of work for 6 months and I was one of the lucky ones (had a cushion, hit the end of it, but found an amazing role).

larrys• 13 years ago

"Even PhD's and extremely driven & accomplished people could not find jobs. "

That's definitely something that people usually don't take into account when they have a great job currently or pursue a "great" career.

Something in demand today that gets you in a great lifestyle will also put you in a super specific niche that, with all you qualifications, you can only do a very narrowly defined job. That may only exist in one place (the place you are currently working).

Otoh, if you are in, say, less glamorous job "sales" and you lose your sales position you can always find a job making money and selling something else. Not that there aren't super specialized sales jobs (say jet engines at GE) that would be hard to duplicate but you could probably land another high paying industrial equipment sales position.

bdcravens3• 13 years ago

I believe the outsourcing story is a bit better than it was in 2000. Better tools, better connectivity. It's entirely possibly that outsourcing could be antifragile.

Even if there is a downturn in outsourcing, so be it. Same happened in the US after the last bubble. Tons of folks who were drawn to the industry for pay, and have little depth in their skillset, flamed out and went back to careers they were better suited for. Those with more depth formed the basis of the current industry: soft business skills, multiple languages, those who loved the craft and learned on their own time.

mtrimpe2• 13 years ago

It seems like this is not a bubble but a storm surge, with the 'wind' being the massive amount of liquidity looking for a positive return on investment.

It's disproportionately being moved into IT because it's one of the few markets that still seems to have the ability to generate a positive ROI, although that's probably been priced in already by now.

That would mean that when the market recovers and 'regular' investments like housing, construction, manufacturing, finance etc. start generating returns again the current craze will just die down rather than pop like a bubble.

It seems to me like the difference between hoarding tulip-bulbs during the mania to get rich vs. hoarding them during World War II to have a source of food as a last resort.

GuiA• 13 years ago

That would mean that when the market recovers and 'regular' investments like housing, construction, manufacturing, finance etc. start generating returns again

That's a bold assumption in itself already.

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

Logged in just to comment on this as well. Housing and construction? We already have way too many homes people can no longer afford either do to foreclosure or income limitations. Manufacturing? Have you seen where real wages are at? Maybe business capex, but there isn't a whole lot of disposable income at the moment if you have a family and make under $100K/year.

And finance. Oh finance. Like we need Yet Another Financial Product To Fuck Us.

Returns? Its hard to generate returns when the majority of your population is shifting towards retirement (in the US) and the wages of your up and coming audience/consumers (18-45) are anemic at best (if there at all).

dpcheng2003• 13 years ago

Nope.

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

well, the bust will as usually happen when everybody finally start to believe and act like there isn't an end to the ride. We seems to be getting there, though not just yet.

Huge up-and-coming developing regions - pretty much anything outside of US and Europe - will vacuum anything that tech can produce. The correction of tech industry from Western world to the rest of the world may be a little bit uncomfortable for those who miss it, i mean it is time to learn Chinese and Spanish this time not Java :)

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

Let's make a parallel here.

People go back and forth about global warming. . errrr. . climate change. Does it exist, doesn't it? My view is even if it doesn't exist, shouldn't we act like it is, just in case, so that if it really does exist, we can say we already mitigated the damage?

You should really act the same way with these bubble stories. Is there a bubble? Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Either way, shouldn't you just plan like there's a bubble to protect yourself?

Snapchat is a great example. Although I can understand Snapchat's co-founder's altruistic view of life, in these time, you gotta take the money and get out while you can. If there is indeed a bubble, those billions will evaporate in a few minutes, never to come back again. At just think what other really cool stuff you could build several BILLION dollars. . . .

dmix• 13 years ago

I prefer acting on intelligence (data) not speculation, especially when it comes to how I spend my life.

area51org3• 13 years ago

Much better to use actual data. Snapchat is one tiny company in a vast ocean, and trying to pretend that its behavior somehow means we're in a bubble is ridiculous.

tedsanders• 13 years ago

It's not like those billions will disappear. Selling Snapchat doesn't generate a billion dollars - it just transfers a billion dollars from one party to another. Everything new that Snapchat's founder will be able to do is something that the old holder of dollars won't.

adam419• 13 years ago

That's one hell of a pascals wager if I've ever seen one

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

The next bubble will slip in slowly under the radar to avoid all this introspection. It won't look like a bubble to enough people until it pops.

Homunculiheaded• 13 years ago

From the Investopedia: "In the year 1999, there were 457 IPOs, most of which were internet and technology related. Of those 457 IPOs, 117 doubled in price on the first day of trading."[0]

We're not seeing this type of investor behavior at all right now (please correct me if I'm wrong). I personally am not really sure that FB and Twitter will ever find a way to make huge profits and become sustainable large businesses but looking at the market it's clear that investors share this uncertainty.

And since anecdote is so popular when discussing bubbles, I still don't see "normal" people talking about how they're going to "make it rich!". I had people in 2007 telling me I was missing huge opportunities to get rich in not purchasing a home, house flipping shows were all over tv. In the late 90s I knew HS students that were trading stocks on the school library's computers during lunch.

Don't get me wrong, especially when everyone I know in the non-tech sector is still struggling, I have anxieties that the party won't last. However looking around I see nowhere near the insanity I remember in 1999 and 2007.

[0.]http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes8.asp

grey-area• 13 years ago

I personally am not really sure that FB and Twitter will ever find a way to make huge profits and become sustainable large businesses but looking at the market it's clear that investors share this uncertainty.

That's not at all clear to me, could you share your reasoning? There are many large SV companies with very high valuations and negative or very low profits in comparison. Companies like Twitter and FB look to me to have a lot of future profit baked into their current valuation - around 100 years worth in the case of FB, and infinite years in the case of Twitter or many other tech stars like snapchat - that's not very realistic and is pretty frothy. Ordinary people are taking a leap of faith and investing in these companies without solid profits to back it up. I'm not persuaded we're in a very rational market right now, given the doldrums the US economy is experiencing, which is a sharp contrast to the new stock market highs we have recently seen.

auggierose• 13 years ago

I don't even need to read the article. Obviously, they have a point. And obviously, most of the comments here are along the line "THIS TIME IT'S DIFFERENT!". Lol.

morgante• 13 years ago

Articles like this are proof that there isn't a bubble.

The defining characteristic of bubbles is irrational exuberance—everyone feeling that the sky is the limit.

Instead, we have an environment where articles like this come out on a regular basis and I probably hear "when this bubble pops" daily. Everyone is afraid that we're in a bubble. So we're probably not in one.

Be greedy when others are cautious. Since the pundits are cautious, it's probably a good time to invest.

somberi• 13 years ago

I am older than your average HN reader and had invested during the the 90s bubble, but luckily did not lose any money. The choir of the press sounds very similar now as it did before. I kept it aside and asked myself if I thought these companies were as valuable as they tout to be. I did not and went all in and sold. Asking myself the same question, I come to the same answer now.

I asked my Dad (70 years old) if he clicked on any advert on Facebook or Google and he had not. Even car sharing companies that make about 6$ a booking need to do a lot of bookings before they turn as much profit as, say IBM.

I am selling.

In Silicon Valley, Partying Like It’s 1999 Again

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