Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Things were different in Silicon Valley in the distant year of 2012, when iPhone sales were skyrocketing and you could still buy a house in Palo Alto for less than $2 million. Back then, most restaurants had menus, not tasting menus. Chief executive officers could say something grandiose at a tech conference without worrying about getting mocked on HBO six months later by the Beavis and Butt-head guy. And a talented entrepreneur could walk into a venture capitalist's office, say his startup was a mobile-first solution for pretty much any problem (payments! photos! blogging!), and walk out with a good-size seed investment. "That pitch was enough to get going," says Roelof Botha, a partner with VC firm Sequoia Capital. "It's not enough anymore."
Botha should know. Over the past five years he's been one of Silicon Valley's most successful investors, thanks to early bets on such companies as Instagram, Tumblr, and Square, all successes owed to the mass adoption of smartphones. Now, though, smartphone growth rates are near zero in the U.S. and falling around the world. And while there are candidates to succeed the iPhone as the next revolutionary computing platform (wearable gadgets, virtual reality), none has made a compelling must-have argument to the mainstream.
That means fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs, at least in the short term. The Bloomberg U.S. Startups Barometer—an index that considers capital raised and number of deals, first financings, and successful acquisitions or initial public offerings—remains high by historical standards but has fallen 21 percent since November 2015.
Earlier this year, One Kings Lane, the online home goods retailer once worth almost $1 billion, sold itself to Bed Bath & Beyond, one of the companies it was supposed to displace, for just $12 million. Jawbone, the maker of sleek wearable fitness hardware once seen as a threat to Apple's, has seen its value fall 50 percent. Since 2015, researcher CB Insights has counted 80 "down rounds," instances of a startup accepting a reduced valuation to raise more venture funding. "There was this fog hanging over Silicon Valley in 2001," says Botha, referring to the last big tech bust. "And there's a fog hanging over it now. There's no underlying wave of growth."
Startups' struggles to grow and woo venture capitalists are only half the story, though, because the VCs themselves are more flush than ever. With global interest rates low, Silicon Valley remains a safe-looking diversification strategy for investors, especially wealthy Middle Easterners and Russians with little regard for rates of return. These investors have poured money into new funds raised by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @01:56PM
Tech bubble will burst when people decide that unpatched Linux and IoT is a disaster.
There's a market here for Blackberry to leverage QNX, if it chooses.
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Saturday October 22 2016, @04:04PM
I switched to a blackberry passport silver edition running bb10 from android because of the almost-weekly critical exploit disclosure. I'm fairly happy with it. Been using it for a few months now and I don't see myself switching out anytime soon.
However, blackberry seems to be full-steam ahead into android. bb10 is all but EOL'd
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday October 22 2016, @05:39PM
But, QNX been licensing a type1 ARM\c86 hypervisor for a while now: http://www.qnx.com/content/qnx/en/products/hypervisor/index.html [qnx.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @03:18AM
Maybe there will be a boom in auto-patch co's
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday October 22 2016, @02:48PM
Yes, if you keep predicting something bad will happen - just wait - it will happen sooner or later. Similarly, if you predict something good will happen - just wait - it will happen sooner or later. People who have figured this out can make a cottage industry for themselves out of their own brilliant track record of predictions, because they'll eventually be right, and from then on they'll have bona fides. If everything else fails, predict that what is happening now will continue indefinitely. (That's what 99% of predictions do.)
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Funny) by pvanhoof on Saturday October 22 2016, @03:59PM
So Nasim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan book was basically just confirmation bias? Damn, wasted my time again. While back then, a week or so before I started reading that book, I predicted I would sooner or later waste my time. Confirmation bias all the way down. Damned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Saturday October 22 2016, @05:57PM
http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html [skepdic.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @02:59PM
Lynch ran the Magellan Fund back in the day when it beat the market regularly and became the biggest non-index mutual fund. He admitted that when there was a downturn he would usually be caught with large positions in growth stocks. He argued that bull markets in recent decades typically extend much longer than bear markets, though, so that he'd rather be "caught with his pants up" when stocks rally.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday October 22 2016, @06:49PM
"Silicon Valley remains a safe-looking diversification strategy for investors, especially wealthy Middle Easterners and Russians with little regard for rates of return. "
Sounds to me like Silicon Valley is being supported by money laundering. That is the only reason I can think that cash rich foreigners are willing to tolerate low or negative returns in a foreign country, or to take high risk bets on things, because when you are laundering cash you are willing to even risk a loss, as long as what comes out of the other side is legit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday October 23 2016, @11:52AM
Sounds to me like Silicon Valley is being supported by money laundering. That is the only reason I can think that cash rich foreigners are willing to tolerate low or negative returns in a foreign country, or to take high risk bets on things, because when you are laundering cash you are willing to even risk a loss, as long as what comes out of the other side is legit.
What is the point of money laundering in the first place? Why bother making it "legit"? The point is that legit money can be used for any investment while the bales of paper cash tied to criminal activity can be seized at any time by the authorities, one of your subordinates, or a rival. The investment turns low value monetary assets into a high value one which is far easier to use and harder to steal.
There are other situations where merely transferring wealth increases the value of the assets. Maybe the country is under economic sanction (not by the US, but by other countries) or the home country is experiencing poor economic conditions so that even a blind dump into high tech developed world businesses would have a better expected return on investment.
But I expect the most common reason would be "use it or lose it" just like the money laundering situation. If the investor expects a high risk of losing particular wealth at home either due to inflation or future asset seizure, they would be very undiscerning about moving their wealth to locales where they don't expect such risks. For example, Russia has already seized oligarch wealth before. So any rich people (whether an oligarch or not) in the country would be looking for places to put a significant part of their wealth where it couldn't be touched by local politics.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Saturday October 22 2016, @07:33PM
Maybe, just maybe, we're approaching the point where investors will look for long term returns, based on tangible , useful, well thought out products and services, coupled with genuine customer support.
Maybe companies will pitch based on their plans to develop a long term relationship with end users, who will happily pay a reasonable price for what they get.
Maybe investors will decide that "selling eyeballs to advertisers" isn't a viable long term plan unless you're creating content that is dramatically better than the ads that surround it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @08:00PM
Maybe investors will decide that "selling eyeballs to advertisers" isn't a viable long term plan unless you're creating content that is dramatically better than the ads that surround it.
Thanks to the "it's not stealing, it's infringing" crowd, it's very difficult to justify spending good money creating new content unless you already have a huge subscriber base to sell into (Netflix, Amazon).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 23 2016, @06:59AM
You are conflating two independent issues (unfotunately too many people on both sides of thedebate do so): Using correct language, and deciding on their morality.
Murder is not stealing. Does that mean murder is OK?
Speeding is not OK. Does that mean speeding is stealing?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.