Looking back on “Here Comes Another Bubble”

In 2007 the Richter Scales captured the zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley bubble atmosphere with this hysterical video:

The irony about this song was that the 2007 bubble was killed by Lehman’s. A lesson in mass hysteria.

And as I was re-watching it last night I wondered – so what happened with those scrolling startups? And was Peter Thiel right or wrong?

When it comes to Facebook, he was probably right. In fact, the valuation of Facebook is staggering and an amazing achievement for the folks at that company!

That got me wondering about the rest of the companies … The hype around MySpace wasn’t probably justified:

And then if you look at the scrolling startups, I tried to circle the ones I knew were still in business. Admittedly I didn’t look through every single one — there are a lot but was struck by how few of them are around:

Starting a company is hard. Creating investor value is hard.

And sometimes it’s worth remembering that for ever Facebook there is a scrolling morass of companies that go nowhere.

And like the song says, those folks are probably back at work looking to start another new thing…