In Silicon Valley there are some that believe that 1998 is back and worry again about a bubble building up. They point to a large number of startups being funded pursuing the same ideas. Oopen source etc. reduce barriers to entry . Their argument is that it is a bad time to start a company because it is highly likely to fail.
On the other hand executives like Steve Ballmer ( Microsoft) and Peter Chernin ( News Corp) are personally spending time trying to acquire promising startups (another 1998 trend).
Good time or bad time in Silicon Valley ?
What about India ?
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Rajan
Quality entrepreneurs means entrepreneurs who have a compelling vision, and the skills to realise the vision…
Risk by itself is not a noble goal – I could do without concept/technology risk. Risk can and does exist in other areas as well, such as financial, management, competitive, timing/market, exit. Noone would give highly expensive equity to VCs if there was no risk.
Alok
Alok,
Could you elaborate on what you mean by quality entreprenuers.
According t me risky ideas are not seen because risky ideas don’t get funded by VC’s. I hardly get to see any big ideas in the last 1+ year in which I am tracking the tech space. Most of the ideas that are to be seen are YAFO (yet another fad oppurtunity) ideas as they are the ones which gets proven in the valley and are easily funded.
Sanjay,
I agree with you on the bubble time euphoria all around but I think the key thing according to me is to understand that there are economic inflections that are happening in big ways and they can’t denied.
Big companies shoppng for startups and that being the only business models of many web 2.0 is also an economic effect. ( opp cost for
buying out for an incumbent is lesser than own R&D). This window may be short lived and after many of such web 2.0 shops might not come up but that is surely not going to be any sign of a bust. Because these economic shifts that are happening in the area of web, media are larger than that.
Also with an earlier bubble at least many of have learnt their lessons for not over hyping things.
Cheers,
Rajan
http://rajan.wordpress.com
I think the Indian environment is still too risk averse — I think the number of quality entrepreneurs I see are much lesser than what should exist in a country like India (both from demand and supply perspective)
The “flavour of the day” markets, including public and post-revenue internet businesses look hot, but the startup market doesnt seem the same way.
In 1998 it was web sites that built up the bubble.
Now it is services(like flikr, upcoming.org etc) that is building the bubble.
In the previous bubble, companies that unified/generalized the trend emerged winners( Eg, yahoo, google, hotmail, amazon)
People were betting on ISP so that they can they can hedge the risk on ‘one site winning over the other’ – but ISPs became commodities making the freefall even more painful.
E-commerce which was a huge promise in the last bubble did not deliver. But Ad emerged as viable.
Bubble or no bubble, correction or no correction there is hope for several winners:
1) Ecommerce ( Remember google emerged from ‘Search is Done’ Thing Like that there is lot to be done with Ecommerce)
2) Platform companies will emerg winners( Everyone is throwing out API, everyone is expected to throw open an API – we need a unifier and it will be a new entrant who sees the big picture pattern! )
3) Incumbants will emerge stronger( Just like Oracle, Microsoft emerged stronger out of the last bubble )
My point is there is lot of scope for prudent investing even with a bust looming ahead.