Pretty sure my gardener qualifies as accredited – he’s owned his house in RWC for ages
Seems to me
1 There are always winners and losers, so who cares?
2 When you invest in private stock, you always take the valuation with a grain of salt. Don’t invest unless you know the company is offering an excellent product.
3 If 175 companies worth $1B close, there will be another 175 companies to suck up those employees.
Also, rumor has it that right now is an iffy time to IPO. There are companies that want to IPO, but in a hesitant market, you won’t get as good evaluation as in a positive one. IPOing is as much about public sentiment and stock market bullishness as about the value of the company.
A lot of people ( not just the very young ) are working in pre IPO and recently IPOd companies . If they are start going bust and have layoffs , BA real estate will definitely see an impact.
Correct me.
Fact: Prices of condos in SF is weakening. Conclusion: Not many IPOers and salaries in unicorns are no longer excessively high.
Fact: High end RE in SFBA is stagnating. Conclusion: Chinese from China is not buying much.
Fact: Rent in SFBA (not exurbs) is stagnating. Conclusion: Big boys are not hiring much.
Fact: Prices and rent in exurbs are appreciating. Conclusion: New hires don’t earn much.
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What makes people say the unicorns are overvalued, as a group? There are always failures. Startups are supposed to be high risk. The fact that so many people have been talking about bubbles makes me think we don’t have a bubble. There is too much self doubt.
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Good question. I don’t have the answer.
I think one line of reasoning is that if the unicorns had a sound business, they would have IPO’d by now.
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Lot of products doing the same thing . It was so easy to get funding so many start ups got funding even though they didn’t have a distinguishing factor. We have so many companies just providing push notification service. Google and Apple have their own and can easily kill them .
Even Drop box and Box would find profitability harder as google and microsoft can provide much cheaper services to promote companies for using their office solutions.
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Easy to say, hard to do.
Not a good line of reasoning. Everyone wants to make the biggest buck on an IPO. You don’t do it just because you have a sound business, you do it at the highest price per share you can get. Even the investors want as much money as possible back. They just don’t want to wait forever too.
A lot of these so-called unicorns will be eventually be acquired (provided that there is actually a demand or desire to reduce competition in the market). Given the recent M&A activities I suspect they know that their rate of return will be higher with an acquisition than going IPO.
Market cap compression is not the same as layoff. You could have a unicorn had its valuation cut by half or 80%, and it still increase the payroll. The key is cash flow. As long as it’s cash flow neutral or positive, it can sustain and the employees will hold onto their jobs. If there is no net loss of jobs, valuation bubble burst is not that bad.
There are many companies whose stock has been flat or down for 20 years, yet it still employ a lot of people. A large percentage of people work for these boring companies. The stock investors can’t do anything but provide jobs to the employees and management.
Many stock investors are not making any money. They just support the jobs for the employees. Kudos to these “non-profit” small investors.
For example, if AMD stock went up 10 times in 6 month and then falls down to original price, it can still employ the same number of employees or even more.
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There is this tidbit in the article:
In the 1970s, the Safeway grocery store in San Francisco’s gleaming Marina neighborhood, known as the Social Safeway, was a cornerstone of the pre-Tinder dating scene. Armistead Maupin made it famous in his 1978 book, Tales of the City, calling it “the hottest spot in town” to meet people. For years afterward, locals called it the “Singles Safeway” or the “Dateway.”
Now I did NOT know that… wonder if it’s still the case? Or singles have moved on to hipper shops like Whole Foods?
Another news of Uber:
Uber picks up Google’s former search chief
“Uber is a geek’s candy store — and why I can’t wait to get started applying computer science to the real world, for real people, to improve real lives,” Singhal wrote.
I am sure you have not seen year-2000 dot.com burst. Read this one cent book. This is what will happen
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-Anthony-B-Perkins/dp/0066640008
And they don’t make the market. The mutual and hedge funds do.
Individual investor activity has no real influence on the market, except on the “pink sheets”.
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Except loosing money with wall streets behemoths !
I used to go there never got a date 
plenty of girls in yoga pants tho
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I 
yoga pants…