back to article Venture Capital investment in Silicon Valley hits dot-com boom levels

We're now at dot-com bubble levels of investment in Silicon Valley, according to the latest stats, raising the specter of another tech crash. PricewaterhouseCoopers' MoneyTree report, which tracks venture capital investment across the US, has announced (though not yet published) its Q4 2014 results, and revealed that in the …

  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Get me that permafailure Krugman on the horn!

    "THIS TIME IT'S ALL DIFFERENT!!"

    No, I don't think so.

    Afterwards:

    "NO-ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED" etc. etc.

    1. joed

      Re: Get me that permafailure Krugman on the horn!

      "NO-ONE CLOUD HAVE PREDICTED" etc. etc.

      FTFY

  2. PleebSmash
    WTF?

    help

    WTF are the red and orange bars in graph #1?

  3. CJ_in_AZ

    One of the things about the so-called "dot-com bust" that everyone seems to forget is that it came right after the Y2K panic. A lot of companies had blown their IT wad in preventing Y2K problems, and a lot of that included investing in shiny new hardware and software. After Jan. 1, 2000, they felt they had to cut back on new investments and enjoy the fruits of that pre-December 31, 1999 feeding frenzy. When nobody is buying, sellers aren't making much money... especially those who have depended (or gotten used to) huge volumes of sales.

    This time around we haven't had the Y2K impetus driving even the most non-tech companies to upgrade their technology.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Y2K caused dot.com V1.0?

    I would have thought it was the mass of start-ups in the Bay Area (most without a snowball's chance in hell of ever turning a profit) ordering new equipment, rather than the established companies "upgrading" for Y2K.

    But what do I know.....?

  5. jonfr

    Deth of internet bubble 2.0

    The internet bubble v2.0 collapse is going to be massive (on a massive) scale. I don't know what the effects are going to be in the long run, but it is going to be something.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Deth of internet bubble 2.0

      You might be right... from the Urban Dictionary: deth is not a retarted way to spell death, it is a name used to measure radiation (like meters, volts and shizzle), megadeth is 1000000 deth =/

      and is also a pun on death, making the name rugged and cool.

      "whoa the radiation is high in here, its above 100000000000 deth"

  6. Christian Berger

    My guess is that there will be 2 differences

    1. We now have the concept of "to big to fail". Just like with banks, we will have Internet companies which are seen as integral to the structure of what governments will claim to be the Internet. One example might be Facebook. There are whole companies which base their business model around Facebook, if it is gone they are gone.

    2. There will be little left from that bubble. The first bubble brought us loads of glass lying in the ground. This and cheap used equipment from failed companies made it easy for new companies to get a head start. One example is Cogent. The investments we have now mostly go into marketing. The value of Facebook or Flickr or whatever doesn't come from anything substantial, but from brands and the hope that one day they can turn their user data into money.

    1. Cliff

      Re: My guess is that there will be 2 differences

      Seeing how readily big, long established high street brands can disappear forever (Woolworths, some others who were big but I can't even remember), the brand value of an online company over a few years can't be that high?

  7. Erik4872

    This boom may bust a little slower.

    One of the things to remember about the differences between 1999 and 2015 is the way these new breed of Internet startups get online. Before, it meant a huge fixed cost of renting space in a data center, and telcos/colo centers geared up to do this. Now it's almost all hosted on AWS/Azure/some other public cloud. The last bust triggered a huge bankruptcy bonanza on eBay for equipment. Now, it's going to trigger a price war between the public cloud providers who are going to be fighting to give away that overcapacity.

  8. The Godfather
    Coat

    8/10 Venture Capitalists (no matter what their size) know sweet FA about the business their money goes into. It's all generally a case of recommendation by others, copying others or taking a punt in the hope one several comes up trumps.

    I've witnessed this in the channel, those heady days of dotcom and more recently with the arrival of cloud based technology, mobility and wearable tech.

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