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Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over With Facebook IPO
Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Blank, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, says that the the Facebook IPO is the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley as we know it. "Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology, and, you know, actual silicon," says Blank. "If you were a good venture capitalist you could make $100 million." But there's a new pattern emerging created by two big ideas that will lead to the demise of Silicon Valley as we know it. The first is putting computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people and the second is that we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face onto the computer and this trend has just begun. "If you think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything you can imagine in life is moving to computers. Companies like Facebook for the first time can get total markets approaching the entire population." That's great for Facebook but it means Silicon Valley is screwed as a place for investing in advanced science. "If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?" concludes Blank. "The headline for me here is that Facebook's success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon valley is over and we're dancing on its grave.""
The headline for me here is that Facebook's success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon valley is over and we're dancing on its grave
Eh, just because Facebook is also used by millions of ordinary people doesn't mean it's not computer technology company and, even more so, doesn't help the world. In fact I think that Facebook has done immersive amount of good for the world. What have you done, exactly? This is extremely obvious to anyone who is older than 15 years old and especially for those of us who live overseas and have friends, family and people all over the world and helps to keep in touch with people easily (and no, I'm not going to bother them all by emailing them on little things).
Morgan Stanley had to buy back all the stock to prevent it turning from Facebook into Faceplant. They'll have to sell it all over again.
Deleted
Venture capitalists' ability to make billions of dollars for no effort is being threatened!!11
If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?"
Anyone who thinks they know what's going to be big in a couple of years is fooling themselves. And if they're predictions come to pass? They got lucky.
For every person who "knew" there are hundreds who also "knew" but failed. Of course that one person will pat himself on the back (along wth other business people) thinking, 'Yep. I knew all along. And here's my next prediction ...."
So what does a mere mortal do?
Hedge and diversify. That's what the best venture capitalists do. They put relatively little amounts in many ventures with the expectation of a single digit percentage actually hitting (gambling speak used intentionally).
And many serial entrepreneurs try and try and try again and hopefully, maybe hit it big. Richard Branson's career is a perfect example of that. For every 10 businesses he starts maybe 1 succeeds - and he's Richard Branson. Just think what the odds are for us.
Of course you have the one hit wonders who hit big the first time out and think they're geniuses ... they're the most annoying to listen to about "how they did it".
Depends. The cancer drug is probably going to be enormously successful, making it lower risk. Whereas expecting your shared in Facebook to be worth the same amount within two years is almost certainly an extremely risky move: hell, they didn't even shift from their opening price on the first day. Your shares in Facebook could be worth half a Friendster in two years time!
I read the summary and am completely baffled by the train of thought.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises (which themselves are unsupported conjecture).
What is this insane troll logic?
Confusion over media venture opportunities versus hardware & hardware control opportunities is a big miss.
The professor is ignoring the arenas outside social media.
One region can't do basic science/engineering along with social networking at the same time. That's just not how things work.
Or maybe a blogger needs a catchy headline so he can get noticed by the tech press.... gee that's never happened before.
They are usually incorrect unless it's a living thing. The PC has been dead more times than I can count. So has the web. Move along, nothing to see here folks.
Can I be the first to say, what utter bullshit, Farcebook is just another precious bubble, it wouldn't surprise me to see Farcebook die long LONG before Silicon Valley does...
It will not only be important to estimate what "value" really is but how robust it is. If you make a technological leap which needs a lot of research investment and which is difficult to copy, then this is value which is robust. Real resources like oil or level of education are such robust values. FB has generated a lot of robust value in building up all the infrastructure and code. But the value of FB includes also networks of people which is also value but is fragile because it is based also on reputation and coolness. If you sit on a real goldmine, you do not have to be cool. You will make money. If you sit on a virtual goldmine like FB, you have to remain popular to please investors and make money. This makes me side more with Steve Blank in the economist opening statement. However, facebook now also has the power to grab and crush smaller competitors and harvaest their talent. The fact that they get the best in the industry might mean that they will start entering more robust markets like entertaining, news etc. This makes me believe also Ben Horowitz. We will have to wait and see.
Facebook must be offering something to the world or it wouldn't have hundreds of millions of active users. It isn't a cure for cancer but it isn't nothing either. The crux of the Blank's argument seems to be that venture capitalists like to invest in things that will make them money and that social media is now more likely (or perceived to be more likely at least) to turn a profit than advanced science. I'm tempted to say that if your cancer research doesn't appear to have any more potential than the next cockamamie up-and-coming social media company then maybe your cancer research doesn't deserve investors.
The conditions under which Facebook would be really worth $100 billion are that somebody with $100 billion in cash was prepared to offer that much for it, and it was accepted. The IPO is, in effect, designed to prevent us finding out the true market value of the company. All we know is that people who almost all already had shares were prepared to exchange them for Facebook shares. Those people might have thought that their shares were about to tank, or that they might make short term profits. We don't know.
The historical analogy, although the exact terms of the deal were very different, is the Time Warner/AOL merger. The merger valued the entire group at around $350 billion. It turned out that the analysts and the investors were comprehensively wrong.
Don't get me wrong; in the Wall Street casino, people may get rich dealing in Facebook shares. But, as set up at the moment, the actual value of the company cannot be inferred from the share price, and all the predictions of a change in world culture are as reliable as the same predictions that were made about the AOL merger.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Most likely, seeing Facebook's success the developers will try to copy Facebook's model, rather than put it in actual work to figure out how to do things better. The end result will be an oversaturated market of Facebook-likes and a graveyard of models (both Facebook-like and non-) that couldn't compete because they didn't start at Facebook's level right now, even if they have most of the features and promise to be better in the future. Some models will survive but ultimately will only service niche markets. Others will be dropped because the developers aren't seeing their costs being recouped in two years, and others will die because the costs of development were too much for them.
Eventually, years later when people are kind of using Facebook, but are kind of bored with it too, someone will finally come out with a Facebook-killer model that's almost exactly like Facebook, but has better features and appeals to a geeky base (like maybe /.book or Face/.?). That model will become a success in its own right, but not as much of a success as they were hoping, and it still won't take much away from Facebook's out of control success.
Unfortunately, this prediction can't be completed at this time as WoW is still king of the MMO's. It's probably a good idea to continue betting on Facebook for a good long while.
From TFWU: "If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?"
How did the economy get so skewed that something that is a real product which can serve a social good is ignored for sheer speculation?
And don't give me: "Rapid communications makes the economy more efficient" The economy was OK, even better, before Facebook. The economy even was OK before the internet, it just took a little longer to get things done( which may not be a bad thing). Also, efficient for who? Efficiency depends on where you are standing and how you measure it, e.g. immediate expenditure vs long term expenditure and immediate gain versus long term gain.
Basically people are speculating on a toy.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Share price implausible. The tl;dr is that of $16 billion, nearly $12 billion had to be bought by the usual suspect banks: Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Among all the hype, that is actually a huge failure.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Evolution of technology splices into various directions. .. simply because as a mechanism they didnt know which features would be most important. No-one devising the SMS system could have even contemplated its usage in something like Twitter. .. we've gone from heaps of one-off pages in cyberspace .. to cyberhubs directed by more relevant search algorithms.
It may have seemed silly but the first examples of the mobile phones went in all different directions
The smart money will move towards the direction it most likely sees the future interests being. Even with the internet as a whole
The future is unpredictable. Evolution of computer systems is reaching a point where the computer itself remains a minor element and the important part of the mechanism remains what social value it can generate. Games .. social interactivity tools.
Social mechanisms are a reflection of how technology will be used. Think of tamagotchi, they were a first level social interaction device. Its not only going to get more interactive .. its going to get a lot more social.
If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?
Remember the spectacularly huge Netscape IPO in 1995. Then this quote would've been:
If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas web browsers will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?
Observe spectacular failure of VCs who failed to think for themselves, and just followed the herd long after the peak had passed.
Same story, different year. The smart money is still investing in biotech, which actually has a real impact on our lives. Nothing to see here...move along...
Everything that can be invented has been invented. There's no possible way that something will come along that will usurp some tech with something better that will make someone billions
This is not a matter of SV being or not being an interesting place to invest VC money. This is about people not buying anymore vaporware.
FB is an empty shell, with no technology behind, making a ridiculous revenue compared to their stock value.
A PE around 100? Are you kidding me? Seriously, this would have been barely bought in 1999, but in 2012? Come on.
Look at the PE of healthy companies. It is less than 1/5th of that. This is were you want to look at, investing your money.
The comparison with a blockbuster cancer treatment drug is just silly. You are mentioning something which would be the Millennium Invention, of course that would draw investor (and I mean, anyone of them) money.
I'm noticing more hamsters doing their video stuff over iphones and neglecting amateur television (ATV). Yes, iPhone is easy and ATV takes work but there is loss of individuals doing hands-on experimentation.
mfwright@batnet.com
This guy sounds like another tech hipster to me.
No one will invest in a company making a super cancer vaccine? One would only make $100M from it? The author clearly knows nothing about the biotech field. People *are* investing in biotechs right now. The idea that people won't invest in other areas because one company made money is simply not in line with real world behavior going on right now.
In terms of Facebook, we'll see how that whole thing pans out for the people who are making Mr Zuckerberg rich right now. I suspect that the Facebook IPO will fall into the category of "moving money from the unwise to the unscrupulous" (much like most of the earlier dotcom IPOs). The Facebook insiders are making money. The underwriters are making money. I don't think the people buying Facebook are going to make money.
Let's play a game. Right now, you have a choice between two things. You get to choose which one, but only one. You pick one, and you lose your chance to have the other.
So, these two things are,
(a) a cure for "cancer" (all of them? your favorite one? I dunno, just make something up.)
(b) hmm... ten million dollars, all yours. Let's call it "out the door", as in, "after taxes" or "protected in special accounts", you know, real-actual ten million dollars for you to spend.
Now I know, it makes your ancestors proud of you as they watch from your version of Heaven while you give the materialist world the finger and settle on the fast-track to eliminate population control.
And I know it makes drunk girls feel emotionally drawn to you when you say that you'd die an epileptic moron in the streets, wearing nothing but washrags and puke, with a huge grey beard, penniless (not even secretly hoarding a miserly stash of monies in a big house protected by hundreds of feral cats), if it meant that no more little, gurgling babies or big-eyed kittens,l or sweet old grandmothers with birds' nests in their hair, or Mr. Working Joe (that sledgehammer-swinging madman who just wans to bring home the chitterlings) would die of cancer any more.
But you're not fooling anybody who isn't a moron. Unless you're already situated in a comfortable and secure lifestyle with a guarantee of moderate wealth (middle to upper-middle class) for the rest of your life barring the calamitous malfunction of civilized society, you're going to say those things over and over until you get up to the actual choice, and you're going to actually choose the ten million dollars.
You're going to shake your head and say "you know, though, at the end of the day, you just hafta do what you hafta do, you know? There'll be other people to carry on the strugglez. Maybe I'll even donate some of this, my money."
The thing is, you don't have to be dishonest. You do realize, don't you, that it's a win-win situation no matter what you pick. Either way you're going to impress somebody. "Wow that guy would save the world if he was Superman!" or "Wow that guy is hard-up for ten million dollars!"
I just look forward to a world where nobody buys that stupid, driveling, bleeding-heart bullshit any more. Any inbred hillbilly can say he wants world peace, but not even his fellow inbred hillbilly brethren believe him for a second.
Why you would parade that shit in front of /. is beyond me.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It used to be that really high end machines were needed to do audio synthesis. I now have a mellotron on my iPhone and iPad. The iPad, for audio editing, is GEC.
It used to take a super high end computer and a fleet of striped SCSI drives to edit the simplest SD Video. Now, you can edit insanely high quality HD video on a fucking laptop. It is only a matter of time before I can edit video from a Red camera on an iPad. At that point, the iPad is GEC.
Fashioning devices on a 3D printer is presently the domain of a laptop. It's just a matter of time before it is on an iPad or an iPhone.
Again, the iPhone and iPad are GEC. The article talks about investments in things non-Web2.0, and it is largely correct. However, even the digital substrate of Web2.0 is under constraint of GEC. If you live 80 year from cradle to grave, that's about 29,220 days. If you were born with the ability to read from birth and read one book a day on a kindle or iPad and each book was about 5 megs on average - (picture books eat a lot of space compared to text) then you're only talking 146GB of storage. That's GEC...
If you listen to music 16 hours a day from cradle to grave, that's only 28 TB @ 256kbps compression. And if you listen to every song twice, that's 14 TB. And if you listen to every song 4 times, that's only 7 TB. And if you listen to every song 8 times, that's 3.5 TB. And if you listen to each song 16 times, that's only 1.75 TB - a 2 TB drive can be had for less than $100. That's GEC....
And video? Do the same math. If you watch a movie (or basically 2 hours of video) a day every day from cradle to grave, and it's 2GB per hour, that's 4GB per day, or about 117 TB. So, what will store a LIFETIME of entertainment? about 120 TB of storage. If the storage trends of the past 20 years hold, I would suggest that a 120 TB drive will be available for less than $250 (in 2012 dollars) in less than 10 years, possibly less than 5, and probably no more than 15 years.That's GEC in storage.
Soooo, what happens when we put all that together? The internet will cease to be a space for file trading thanks to the concerted actions of governments and IP capital. File trading will go to Sneakernet, and the sneakernet will consist of PirateBoxes in cafes and friends attaching their Thunderbolt drives at home, and moving stupendous amounts of data between machines and watching them on flat screen TV or on their audio kit which will run off the wireless video card in their iPhone or iPad. GEC. Basically, innovation at that point, as in BASIC innovation will cease. Content, as in something stored, simply evapourates onto a "life drive" of media files. Encumbered with patents and a ceiling of perception created by the human sensorium, GEC will reign until the industrial system turns the planet into a smoking dead husk. The biosphere collapses, cities flood, people starve, but damn - did you see American Idol last night? Fuck - that chick sings like an angel...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Impartial, disinterested, university funded R and D - which is what everything from music synths to Google started out as:
http://facts.stanford.edu/research.html
-is a natural force for good in developed countries and it's never going to be "over" unless that developed country is "over" .
The leveraging for "Yearbook On The Web !!! " -type opportunities to make money off people naive enough to surrender their most intimate details to a group of total strangers whose sole aim is to monetize same, well, that may be over.
If you compare FB with Google, the differences tell the real story. FB could be replaced in functionality by any number of me-too--products because its peculiar success is not borne of any kind of technological breakthrough but only the fact that it, and not some other equally ordinary-technology product, was the victor in a product space with network effects strong enough to create a natural "winner take all" market.
Meanwhile, Bing is still trying to be 1/10th as good as Google is at doing what it does, despite billions of dollars at the M$'s disposal and some of the best minds in the world working for them.
When the story of the internet is told, it will go like this- DARPA, FTP, email, the web, HTML, Mosaic then Google. Those are the big events. Those are the technological breakthroughs that that literally changed the world. FB will be a footnote.
So to the extent that FB's value is an exercise in bubble economics and phantom value, maybe this is the end of SV's love affair with this kind of thing. That proposition is dubitable since people with too much money generally earned it by doing wholly useless things like co-locating their servers closer to NYSE's servers to give them a multi-billion dollar edge when doing flash trading -
http://theweek.com/article/index/204396/wall-streets-secret-advantage-high-speed-trading
and having custom FPGA made for them in order to grind out nanosecond advantages over their competitors in high frequency trading -
http://www.impulseaccelerated.com/app_financial.htm
so it's unlikely these same people are going to have the fine antenna necessary to distinguish innovations which create revenue opportunities by delivering real, ongoing value from those that have "Hindenberg " painted in man-sized letters on the side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA
Long live the free market and real innovation delivering real value to the lives of real people . Here's to you.
It's not insane logic at all. If you're an investor and you have $xK to invest what would you invest in? Hard high-tech like cancer research (lots of work, time and money, higher risk, low chance of success) or social media (much less work/time/money and a higher chance of success). Zuckenberg didn't get rich curing cancer, he did it inventing a social media website. This is why investors and entrepreneurs flock to social media projects and ignore the hard stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nI2bVtQ6Kk
I don give a damn cuz I'm stone dead already...
"If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?" concludes Blank.
Blockbuster drugs being developed get significant investment by Silicon Valley? That's news to me, since I thought they were either developed by a number of large pharmaceutical companies, or by startups by a handful of students who pray that their company gets bought out by large pharmaceutical companies or dies from lack of funds. In the later case, the investors who propped up the startup will either get their windfall when the pharmaceutical company buys them out in a few years (which will be some number of years much less than ten).
Also, who claimed that medical advances and programs for the masses are mutually exclusive? I don't think that's true.
If everybody expected huge returns on facebook stocks then the price of those stocks would go sky high and investors would rather consider some tech-stocks with big returns, maybe, in 10 years. Problem solved, the market did all the work.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
That should be a law analogous to the Godwin law, that says: if you say "What have you done, exactly?" you lose.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The issue for Facebook, however, is that none of the other protocols made anybody silly rich, and XMPP is a freely available and very easy to deploy server based system. I do wonder how many "investors" realise just how much of Facebook's technology is replicable at very low cost.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
and phrases like "golden age", "everything" in the text don't help either. When people start talking like that, I am always tempted to remind them how incredibly redundant we are on all levels. How absurdly whimsical our demands are that drive the market. That is that if you consider only one big scale that there is: which is survival of human race.
Nothing is over until is over. Facebook grew up to the ability to sell shares. That's all that happened, nothing more. The fact that is the "biggest" in whatever sense they mean it, does not mean anything. We also had the most expensive ever artwork sold every year or five years.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
If the VCs you're talking to are all switching to social media now, you're probably talking to the wrong guys anyway. Sure, there might be a few who understand the risks and opportunities, but blindly following trends smells like ignorance, and ignorant investors are the worst you can get. If you have to follow the Silicon Valley model, concentrate on the folks who specialize on deals within your particular industry.
Also, VC doesn't appear to be the smartest choice here anyway. Apply for grants, talk to people who understand the problem your startup is going to solve, start a Kickstarter, go to banks (rarely works, but when it does, it does) and if that's not enough, try VC. I'm not saying VC is always a bad choice, but it's real usefulness is in rapid business development, not starting a brand new, R&D-intensive enterprise, which is kind of implied by will pay me nothing for ten years.
If you can't get the thing properly patented, you're not going to fund it with social media in or out. The trouble isn't social media, it's that monetization is a really limited incentive within an industrial society where lots of great ideas fall into the category of public goods or reduction of externalities that just aren't incentivized properly and hence never get realized.
Say you come up with a great project to revolutionize education, health, energy or transportation - it might be to disruptive for governments to fund it (assuming there's a budget), but if there's no way to exclude non-buyers from benefiting, you're not going to get private funding either.
If there's revolution of thought within this century, I'm predicting it'll be in economics. I'm fine with a market economy for consumer products, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face onto the computer and this trend has just begun.
Did I just imagine the social groups that built up around dialup BBSes (which is how I met my wife), Usenet, even MUDs and web forums before Facebook ever came along? People were griping that computers were eroding the value of face-to-face communication almost from the first email that was sent out.
I'll certainly agree that Facebook has accelerated that trend, but it's a trend that began 30 years ago.
"Consumer products" is a bad choice of words, I'm using it as !=public goods, not !=B2B/B2G
Hello, the 1990s called, they wanted their investment strategy back. Get with the times, man! Investing today means identifying a company that's climbing, showering the creator in money and hyping his product, pushing him to an IPO, hype it some more and milk it, then dump it, sell off the husk and move on to the next.
The idea of "high risk" vanished from VC's considerations a while ago. By now, there's so many upstarts vying for your money that you can easily wait and see which ones will thrive and which ones will wither that you can sit back and relax until you KNOW what will soar before you pump your money in. The fun part is that they can't even say no, because they're usually not the only one in the market and if they say no, number 2 will say yes and with their money become number 1 over night and you will disappear into oblivion.
This is high reward with essentially no risk for VCs. And you want to tell me they will stop doing that? For real? VCs may be much, but stupid they're not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... the day before the IPO.
Everyone can see smart money doesn't think Facebook stock is worth the paper its printed on.
When Zuckerburg wants to keep his billions, and user data is the only real asset Facebook has ...
I predict that in six months, you'll find out that Facebook did [insert very nasty do-not-want thing with user data] three months before.
I don't think the Facebook of the future is a company that I want to have my personal data; or anything to do with me, really.
So I got out while the getting out is good. I can see the weather report; a hurricane is descending upon Facebook.
The only people with something to lose are the ones who are still there when it hits.
If you're interested in a solution to this sh*t, try replacing all taxes with a use fee for property rights assessed by bids placed in escrow for their purchase -- and replace government by distributing the fee to adult citizens evenly with local jurisdictions responsible for organizing their citizens into militias as do the Swiss.
Seastead this.
This is nothing new it's long been known that in SV investors especially early stage ones want their money back with a profit IN MONTHS -- NOT IN YEARS. And this isn't just the culture of Silicon Valley, it's common around all of the United States -- a country of self-entitled cry babies who think the world owes them a living and who value material wealth and fame above all else but who want to put in fuck all effort to get it -- a country who's debts now greatly exceed it's entire GDP, a nation that has been staring down the gun of economic collapse for 20+ years and hasn't done anything about it while putting itself under in more debt.
We've seen the loss of "Risk Takers" before -- listen to Frank Zappa's complaints about the modern Music Industry run by self-entitled kids who grew up on the music put out by the Risk Takers "who know" what music will sell and effectively take no or as few risks as possible while taking as much money from the artists and consumers as possible. This is nothing new -- we have words for it: self-entitlement, egotism, apathy and greed.
Look at the modern Bankers over on Wall Street who are motivated mainly by the pursuit of one upping their peers in the Wealth Segment and are willing to screw over millions of Americans in order to say they made a few million more this year than Joe over at XYZ Hedgefunds.
Look at Congress -- the Ring Masters of this Circus who for years have prosecuted "Inside Traders" and passed laws against that while doing themselves it as a matter of course for years -- and not one single mention of criminal charges for people like Pelosi who got caught red handed making fortunes from insider trades and instead just excuse it as acceptable behavior that might not be ok after all.
And look at the American Citizen, sitting there able to do nothing while the value of his shitty little Dollar drops year after year, his bankers and his own government are blatantly and openly lying and stealing from him -- and he clings to his gun saying "he can at least defend himself from them if it comes to that" -- ignoring the fact that the bankers with their government cronies have enough guns to quickly turn any citizens revolt with their tiny pea shooters into a grease stain in short order -- but every Congressional session has new talk of attempts to enact laws to outlaw or further restrict ownership of peashooters -- just be on the safe side, it is after all best not to take risks.
Frankly -- it's unsustainable -- we're just getting to the point now that the condition is so bad and the symptoms are so endemic that if the USA were a cancer patient, the doctors would no longer consider this patient a person as much as a massive tumor.
If the predictions of the Pentigon, MIT and others all pointing to a critical level of climate change and economic collapse all within the next 10 to 15 years are anywhere near correct, we seem to be setting ourselves up for a very glorious fall.
America needs an serious attitude correction -- unfortunately it will take a very painful and drawn out lesson for the "Average American Way of Thinking" and thus, the American Identity to be changed. And most likely if anything majorly bad did happen, such as the loss of the Eastern Seaboard to the oceans and the loss of large parts of the World Economy, those in power would quickly swoop in to take more power -- ie: The Military Industrial Complex turning into a Martial State.
Facebook stock is going to tank.
They opened with a price/earnings ratio of 92. (Closed around 88, as the stock price dropped from 42 to 38). A normal P/E ratio for a successful large company is between 10 and 20. (Google is at 18, Microsoft at 10, IBM at 15, Apple 13, News Corp. 16).
What this means is that Facebook has to increase their revenue by a factor of 6. They can't increase their user base by that much; there aren't enough people on the planet.. Their Alexa traffic peaked in mid-2011, so they're no longer growing. Their revenue per ad is dropping. General Motors just dumped Facebook as an ad medium because it was ineffective. Facebook has lately been increasing the page space devoted to ads. Myspace tried that before they tanked.
We've probably seen the peak of ad-supported businesses. There's only so much ad spending in the world to compete for. That industry is not the future. It's the past. Like the "house prices can only go up" crowd.
It's important to look at key ratios, like P/E and median house price / median income. Those tend to stay in a narrow range over decades, and when they get too high, it's a bubble.
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer. Downside
We've got a loooong way to go before GEC is here. Entertainment technology won't be "good enough" until it is literally indistinguishable from reality by all five senses, however enhanced they are by future tech (how would HD video hold up when you've got the visual resolution of a hawk?); and whatever new senses science brings to the party.
Facebook going public has freed the money of those who have invested in it before it went public. Now these people will have to invest that money again and these imaginary dollars will probably go to high-tech startups again. And I don't believe Silicon Valley is about science, but rather about technologies that make our lives easier. Advanced science has always been and will be done at universities or very large companies.
We don't know what agreements FB and the underwriters had for propping up the IPO, so it's possible that FB walked away with a lot more money at $38 than at $28-$34. However some of the money spent on buybacks could come out of FB's money pile.
The traders won for sure, executing the almost 600 million volume.
Buyers who subscribed for the IPO and sold yesterday lost 1-2% for the transaction.
My bet is: FB, banks, traders, stock exchange won, people screwed.
Of the $16 billion they "sold", $13.86bn had to be bought back by the underwriters. Morgan Stanley, its lead adviser, ended the day owning 162m shares, worth £6.16bn, followed by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, which ended the day with $3.2bn and $2.4bn holdings respectively. Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital each held $1.04bn stakes.
The underwriters will be desperately buying shares through 3rd party holding companies on Monday to artificially hold up the price and to save face, but normal every day folk know a dud - this isn't 2001!
> "If you think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything you can imagine in life is moving to computers.
Music has been internationasl mass media since the printing press and whoever invented staff sheets.
It got with it time wise by the invention of radio
Nothing much has changed since then.
Other methods of interaction are much the same. Online conection may speed things up but there is no substitute for the real thing. There never will be.
Science is still around, its just shifted. You say 'oh, teh web is all brokenz', and in one respect that's true. But there are still a lot of silicon shops in the valley, and there is still ven-cap money floating around. I just watched an old video (nearly 2 years old) of the successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 1 into earth orbit. The money for SpaceX came from the guy who sold PayPal. Public money wouldn't go into space launches anymore (people in suits don't want to risk space launches), but private money will. Suits at a table are gutless wonders and collectively stupid as bricks. As Americans defer to suits more and more (both in politics and corporately), America's star fades. There are still individual entrepeneurs who will stick their necks out and try the impossible dream. Many won't make it, but some will. There used to be a lot more (both in the valley and not), but they haven't gone away completely. Corporate America's defeatist mentality (we can't make enough money here), has killed a lot of America's clout in the world, and if the global currency shifted to the Yuan, the USA would look like Greece writ large.
AOL
"When it is more profitable to build an electric car than to invest in a credit card, we will know that the crisis is over,"
America has a resource allocation problem, but it isn't a problem between biotech and cloud tech, it's a problem between mortgage backed securities and ALL tech. People are investing capital in meaningless loans, instead of building new things. That's a real drag on innovation in the country.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Steve Blank should stop lamenting and instead invest in Blueseed. Now THAT's hardware.
This is not Silicon Valley issue this is USA issue in a microcosmos of the bigger issue that the next two decade is to become the norm. Long term anything is out, short term financial gain is all. The question is not is this going to be the norm, the question is how much of the population will not get it and become a destitute majority of the population.
I see quite a few major assumptions here:
- All VCs are stupid. Sure they're all greedy in the sense that they want to realize their ROI as soon as possible, but I'm assuming most of them do some research before jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. Otherwise they'd quickly run out of money to invest.
- Social media is an infinite market. Sure its large, but its not infinite. New players are already starting to struggle. Look at Google+ for an example. Even with all of the power and recognition (not to mention financing) of the Google brand behind it, there's report after report of how few people can be bothered keeping two social media sites up to date.
- Ignoring the "social" part of "social media." This somewhat ties in with the previous point, but essentially it amounts to the fact that social networks require a fairly large critical mass of users before they can really take off. Take a look at instant messengers for example. Almost every (localized) market is dominated by one of the four major IMs (MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo). Not only is there not really any room for a new IM, the four big ones even have a hard time encroaching on each others' territory. Aided somewhat by multi-network clients such as Trillian, but still the large majority of IM users stick with what they've got and refuse to switch because its what all of their friends are using. Social media type sites are in the same situation.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it makes the big assumption that money is the only motivator in Silicon Valley. I would seriously question that assumption. If nothing else, somebody's got to be building the machines that these sites on running on!
Making a long/mid term investment in a dot-com is kind of crazy talk.
Yes. Short it or get the fuck out. Otherwise get yourself fitted for a barrel.
Yeah, right.
http://www.facebook.com/drfuhrman
"Joel Fuhrman M.D. is a board-certified family physician, best-selling author and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods."
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vitamin-D-Council/332321220632
"The Vitamin D Council is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to end the worldwide epidemic of vitamin D deficiency."
Just saying... Even though I normally cite their direct websites... Both eating better and getting enough vitamin D have been show to prevent, and in some cases reverse, a variety of diseases including cancer.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So this is purely opinion, naturally because This Is Slashdot.
The Root Cause of the problem which is personified by The (perceived, if nothing else) Failure of The Facebook IPO is that Facebook (and others, eg Twitter) is not much more than a MASSIVE degradation of the Signal To Noise Ratio across the internet.
Sure it facilitates and contributes (or contributes to) many useful things, but the NOISE so excessively overwhelms any actual benefit.
Net Profit To Society is severely negative.
Not that I'm denying that millions of people use it, not that I'm denying millions of people *enjoy* using it, but seriously folks all arguments based around the concept that popular == good belong in Junior High School.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Are you kidding me? The two have nothing to do with each other. One is a (single) social media company. The other is a grouping of all other things (notably hardware companies) that create hardware for you to use Facebook on. Trying to drive your stock up or something buddy?
Social media will remain but it's not that big a deal. There are a lot of things it doesn't do well and ultimately I don't see how it's a threat to the valley.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What happens now that the company is public?
Yes, Zuckerberg has controlling interest, but what about the inevitable clash between making money at the expense of users?
How will users feel to have their personalities and personal histories bolted to the corporate bottom line as they two incompatible goals collide?
FB could cave in to vk.com, which is basically a clone of FB, but with completely unregulated up- and downloads of music and videos.
Default interface is English.
There's even a logout button in the main menu.
The Facebook IPO was heavily supported by major banks, otherwise a loss would have been felt on the first day. Then in the following days, shares for FB went down 11% in value, while Apple and Boeing went up, and in the mean time a government-owned "make-and-do" company like GM pulls its adds off FB because it doesn't see the value of the platform for advertizing.
It's the end of Silicon Valley, is FB. Really. ;) I love life's little ironies.