The fool at the table

Am I the fool at the table?

The fool at the tableAm I the fool at the table?


Am I the fool at the table?

(taken from Steve Blank)

“My esteemed colleague Ben Horowitz essentially makes four arguments: 1) look at how relatively cheap Apple, Google and Amazon stock is compared to their growth; 2) Major technology cycles tend to be around 25 years long with the bulk of the purchases occurring in the last five-to-ten years. The major adoption wave for the Internet technology platform will hit in the next 8 years; 3) the economics of building Internet businesses has changed; 4) the markets are much bigger.”

Therefore Ben concludes that boom is coming…and do you want to miss it because it has the possibility of becoming a bubble?

If this were a magic act, we’d suggest that Ben’s arguments are misdirection. To answer the question before the house, “Are we in a tech bubble?” Ben offers that as Apple, Google and Amazon survived the dot.com crash, we can ignore the fate of the thousands of failed public and private dot.com companies when the bubble burst in March of 2000. I believe the issue isn’t whether we’re on a 25-year tech cycle or that the next 8 years are really going to be great. The issue is whether the next 100+ tech IPO’s carried by this bubble will be worth their offering price in 8 years.

Written in 2011…I find this a very interesting question.

Is this same thing happening now?

There’s a saying in Poker, “If you can’t figure out who the Mark is at the table, it’s you.”


Originally published at gonen.blog.

Tagged in Startup

By jordangonen on December 2, 2017.

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Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.