I saw a headline on December 24 which put a damper on my Christmas Eve:
Ummm – – so why on earth would this bug me? I don’t have a dog in this fight. If Theranos goes bankrupt, it doesn’t hurt or help me one bit. If they become the most valuable company in the world (ha!), the situation is the same. Utterly neutral and meaningless. So why should I care?
I hate tech bubbles.
No, that’s not the secret. Everyone knows that. The secret I am referring to is a company named, literally, Secret. And the existence of this company, as well as the easy $6 million its co-founders pocketed when they shuttered the place, is absolutely symptomatic of this bubble-of-bubbles we are living in (the third one of the past fifteen years, incredibly).
I didn’t even know Secret existed, because I’m too old to spend my time worrying about every new little app that comes along that lets teenagers engage in cyber-bullying and exchange dick pics. It’s just not my cup of tea. But I happened to stumble across this article yesterday, which was headlined:
Now a startup shutting down isn’t any bigger news than someone finishing a satisfying lunch somewhere, but the “Ferrari” mention intrigued me, so I read further.
Greetings from Palo Alto. Over three years (and thousands of posts……) ago, I wrote Color and the Mania in This Valley. The thrust of my post was:
+ Color.com had received $41 million to develop an app;
+ The app sucked out loud;
+ The company deserved to fail.
Well, fail it did (as I announced in the 4th post I did about the stupid place), and in those three+ years, the bubble has just continued to inflate. 2014 makes 2011 seem downright sensible. (more…)
Yes, it's my fourth post on the poster child for Silicon Valley VC retard-excess, Color.com
I was reminded of them simply because I was strolling downtown, getting a milkshake for my son, and I thought I'd peek in to see how things were going at the firm which got $41,000,000 in funding without so much as a PowerPoint presentation. Here's the photo I just took:
Late last year, I paid a visit to Josh Brown ("The Reformed Broker") and had a pleasant chat. I went to his blog a week later and put up a comment, shown below, stating my belief that Facebook's IPO day would mark an important turning point in the market.
I forgot all about this, but totally by chance, a few days ago, I re-visited that comment and I saw that someone had put in a snide reply.
Errr, actually, Facebook only goes public one time, so I'm not sure how I could make such a declaration "a lot". It's a specific day, and I do believe that Facebook's IPO will be a seminal event. There's only one Facebook, and it has only one IPO. It's not like there are twenty other Facebook-equivalents waiting behind it, and because of the public's fascination with this offering, I do believe it'll mark a tipping point.
