{"id":13381,"date":"2015-10-14T06:54:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-14T11:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13381"},"modified":"2015-10-14T06:54:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T11:54:02","slug":"the-death-of-hopium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13381","title":{"rendered":"The Death Of Hopium"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Death Of Hopium<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Tech Bubble 3.0 is in the process of bursting<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As many readers know, I spent 13 years living and working in Silicon Valley before partnering up with Chris to start Peak Prosperity.<\/p>\n

I got my MBA at Stanford in 1999 when the dot-com bubble was at its zenith, and worked for both\u00a0a VC-funded start-up as well as one of the biggest Internet juggernauts\u00a0(Yahoo!). I lived in Palo Alto, the central core of the tech scene.<\/p>\n

As a result, I have a pretty good read on how Silicon Valley works. Many of the folks I worked and went to school with are now in leadership positions at the big operating companies, VC firms and hedge funds in that ecosystem — so I have personal knowledge of who’s making the decisions.<\/p>\n

And it’s no secret that I think things have degenerated into a steaming pile of hucksterism.<\/p>\n

The “engine of our economy”, the “cradle of innovation”, the “land of tomorrow” — whatever breathless hyperbole the fawning media is using this week — is a sham. Silicon Valley has become a\u00a0factory of hype<\/a>, funneling gobs of early-stage capital into whatever half-credible concepts it can think of, and then pimping the artificially-inflated initial results of those tarted-up\u00a0ventures to whichever “greater fool” is willing to acquire it or buy its IPO. Let that idiot figure out if it will ever turn a profit…<\/p>\n

Like the too-cozy relationship between DC and Wall Street, I see a similar one between Wall Street and the Tech sector. They collude to pump out as many opportunities as they can — private placements, acquisitions, IPOs, secondary offerings — to cash out the insiders and foist the long-term financial risk onto the “dumb money” (pension funds, foreign capital, retail investors, corporations desperate to enter the “digital age”).<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Death Of Hopium Tech Bubble 3.0 is in the process of bursting As many readers know, I spent 13 years living and working in Silicon Valley before partnering up with Chris to start Peak Prosperity. I got my MBA at Stanford in 1999 when the dot-com bubble was at its zenith, and worked for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9860,109,2450,2218,655,9252,3924,9861,860],"class_list":["post-13381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-adam-taggart","tag-capital","tag-hucksterism","tag-peak-prosperity","tag-propaganda","tag-silicon-valley","tag-tech-bubble","tag-venture-capital","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13382,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13381\/revisions\/13382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}