Bubble has it been Five year already
Busting of bubble is the theme of blog-a-than being run by Om Malik. This post is related to that. Here I would share my thoughts with blurbs from already published articles of this series. Make sure to read all the articles published in this series over here.
Has it already been five years? Doesn’t feel like it. Seriously. In retrospective when I think, my first hint of the bubble should have been when I had put my resume as a Java Developer on dice.com (it might still be there) I was living a serene life in Louisville KY, and then being a geek, I felt the pull of Silicon Valley during those days. I should have posted my resume around mid-night EST. I got few replies immediately. But craziness happened the next day. My cell phone won’t stop ringing. My home answering machine was full with messages. There were folks who would send the job offer papers right away in the reply mail. I was amazed. So many people wanted to hire me. Here is another funny bit, my analysis of prospective employers was based on guess what, company’s press releases and reading analysts. I didn’t knew
While it was nowhere near as bad as it would eventually get in the late days of the tech boom, it was already obvious that technology equity analysts were becoming overpaid PR flacks. Our job was to dress up press releases in ornate prose chock-full of financial ratios and jargon and then parade them around. The ugly truth, however, was that we were pimps for investment banking business: Declining commissions and rapidly-rising technology stocks had conspired to turn us all into technology sluts.
I finally arrived in Silicon Valley, all dreamy eyed. I was immediately hooked to CNet Radio. What a gem it was. You would get all the news while stuck in traffic jam on I-880. Both sides of 101 were totally crammed with billboards of all these companies. I would often think of them as, man I could have started that. Andy Kessler’s reasoning for so many billboards is quite right
The only thing slowing the growth of Momo funds was the lack of names. You could only put away so much Dell or Cisco until you owned the whole damn company – so Momos turned to Wall Street and begged for new names. Wall Street didn’t have to be asked twice – and took public via IPO anything that wasn’t nailed down – and nothing having to do with the Internet was nailed down, no matter how stupid.
I was part of the generation who got swanky jobs even in their early twenties. What was there to hate about it. But then shit happened. Luckily for me it just meant switching few employers. The money I lost is not even worth whispering. Now after five years I have these stories of wild parties, kids buying luxury cars and a bubble I was part of. Before concluding a lesson to learn, mastered first by Om Malik
the biggest lesson which I learnt was that when VC firms hire a journalist to help them with investments, its a sure and perhaps the final sign of a market top, a bubble that is about to pop.