If you read about Silicon Valley these days, you’ll notice quite a bit of opinion out there that a new dot-com bubble is building. A sense of dot-com deja vu, some say.
One of the Silicon Valley movers I give quite a bit of attention to is Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. He’s posted an interesting assessment of the current climate there:
[...] Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks. I don’t know what it is, but the same thing happened in the late nineties before the bubble burst. Lots of startups got funded that made no sense but people got excited anyway. A unique, beautiful and well executed idea was not a story worth talking about until that first round of big, eye-popping capital. People become more anxious, and more likely to snap at someone in anger or jealousy. Rumor mongering spikes, and a crucial balance is lost. It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.
It’s an interesting perspective. On a tiny scale by comparison, throughout this year I’ve been experiencing a sharp upturn in the volume of unsolicited press releases and other information I receive from PR firms on behalf of new startups in or close to Silicon Valley, or small tech firms elsewhere in the US who want to get onto the current wave.
Is that indicative of a bubble about to pop? I don’t know but it’s a feeling I have that’s been building all this year.
The concluding paragraph in Arrington’s post best sums up the picture:
[...] I left Silicon Valley at the peak of the insanity last time around, and I was pleasantly surprised when I returned in 2005 to see so much goodwill and community surrounding innovation. Now, it’s just like the old days again, and Silicon Valley is no longer any fun. In fact, it’s turned downright nasty. It may be time for some of us to leave for a while and watch the craziness from the outside again. In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory. We can focus, once again, on the technology. And the burgers and beer.
Is he right? Is there a metaphorical South Sea Bubble about to pop?
Time will tell although they may not be a lot of that before it does.
