Eight years ago, we were in the midst of a frothy, frothy tech bubble.
It was all anyone could talk about—at investor conferences, in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, in notes by research analysts. “Irrational exuberance has returned to the internet world,” The Economist warned, in one of many stories on the topic. That late-1990s feeling was “back,” said Esquire, pooh-poohing LinkedIn’s business model and arguing that “American ingenuity and American gullibility” were thriving in Silicon Valley. This magazine was not immune to writing about it, nor was yours truly.
Then, poof! It was gone. The tech bubble did not burst. It simply disappeared as a matter of concern. Investors kept on investing. Valuations kept on rising and falling. Companies went public, got acquired, succeeded, and fell apart. The business commentariat moved on. But perhaps it should not have. The 2011 popless panic has something to tell us about ingenuity, investment, and how money gets made in Silicon Valley today.
Back then, the concern was that very little money was getting made at all. Investors were throwing billions of dollars at start-ups with scant or nonexistent revenue str ..
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