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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I’m of the opinion that the overwhelming majority of tech startups are overvalued and only existed as a result of absurdly low interest rates that no longer exist. Many of them would have failed eventually as a result of their inability to raise money and if this pushes some of them out sooner that’s a good thing.

More fundamentally I hope that this pushes some of the intellectual capital currently wasted on basically pointless ventures into more productive parts of the economy.

China did this explicitly a couple of years ago by straight up banning tech startups and I believe it was good policy (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-tech-giants-policy). I’m glad that interest normalization is having the same effect.

I’m of the opinion that the overwhelming majority of tech startups are overvalued and only existed as a result of absurdly low interest rates that no longer exist.

Speaking as a software contractor who primarily works for startups, and lost a client yesterday due to SVB, I would say this is not just your opinion but the general understanding of how all this works. Nobody in my world is particularly surprised by any of this; it's just how the wheel turns.

I think most people have no experience with startups and thus no appreciation for how absurdly productive a small group of unbridled engineers can be.

I'm not generally worried about the engineers being productive, I'm usually worried that the leadership has no clue of what the engineers should build, and leadership is like throwing around marketing terms and buzzwords to get capital with little idea of if they'll be able to get customers.

And not only that, these insiders often use sky-high valuations to cash out for hundreds of millions of dollars. Index investors and pension funds are left holding the bag while executives in Carvana, Lemonade, and other "tech" garbage get rich. There are so many companies that never had a viable business model and should never have existed.

This is the tech bro version of the labor theory of value. I think nobody seriously disputes that a small group of unbridled engineers can be absurdly productive in creating X; the question is more like, “who the heck needs X?”

Or, in many cases, the far more fundamental question of ‘what is x and does it have potential applications?’.

I think you may give media too much credibility in portraying what startups work on.

A company like Juicero is exceptional, but it’s also not even an a priori bad idea. The rich buy all kinds of luxury goods that seem absurd to most people.

I have a $3,000 chair that provides massages that are maybe half as good as those provided by a person. The Osaki company that makes it, as far as I know, is still in good shape.

I have a robot that does a poor job of cleaning my floors and that frequently gets lost or stuck. iRobot is still around and I’m guessing profitable.

I guess the question is how often do you use your chair and how often would you get a chair massage in real life. One could imagine a pay back period in 2 years. Then provided the chair pats for say 10 years you get 8 years of half as good massages for free. Maybe now you only go once or twice a year for the real deal. Could on net be worth it.

Same with iRobot. It isn’t a replacement to cleaning generally; but can reduce the need to clean.

I live/work in the middle of all of this with what I think is a pretty good big picture view. Almost everything these guys do lately is some combination of absurd and/or hyper niche, and at the very least incredibly overvalued.

Overvaluations were at least partially corrected last summer. Lots of startups have been unable to raise new funding rounds as a result.

Though I'd argue about the definition of "overvaluation." Is something overvalued if the market has access to practically free money and just needs to park it somewhere?

That’s true, I have never worked at a start up and am basing my opinion off of some wasteful enterprises I have heard about second hand. Although I would ask at what level you think svbs depositors should be bailed out at above 250k if any?

From a moral hazard perspective, zero.

That’s harder to justify if the people bearing the cost of avoiding the hazard nearly all had nothing to do with it. There’s a risk of cascading failure that could cause failures for companies barely related to SVB, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to quantify that risk.

It’s not a question of the productivity of the engineers, it’s a question of the value of the products they’re building.

That some of what’s being built will end up not being worth anything is built into the startup funding ecosystem.

If VCs could scry a crystal ball they would, but judging what will turn out to be valuable is hard. Even so, with all the failures, the sector as a whole is still absurdly productive.

It’s almost criminal that so few people are able to participate in this part of the economy due to accredited investor rules.

What are those "more productive parts of the economy" in your opinion?

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