<story><title>The Silicon Valley Loop</title><url>https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/the-silicon-valley-loop-malcolm-harriss-palo-alto.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xivzgrev</author><text>That was a good insight on Uber. Some huge fund is looking to invest, and they like you.  But if you say no, they give that massive cash to your competitor.  They still get into the market, your competitor zooms past flying to new heights and you are choking on their dust.&lt;p&gt;Helps explain some of the zany fundraising I saw over the past decade. It’s like a mini series of Ponzi schemes.  All that matters is growth, because it’s easy to sell equity when something is rapidly growing. So seed sells to A, A sells to B, B sells to huge fund, and huge fund sells to public markets.  The hype lasts just long enough to IPO (as the retail public finally can get a piece of this super hyped company) and…it all falls down because now profitability matters.&lt;p&gt;Like this article said - it didn’t matter if your product ended up dying. It just mattered that you made a lot of money for early investors, so they’ll want to back you again.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Silicon Valley Loop</title><url>https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/the-silicon-valley-loop-malcolm-harriss-palo-alto.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>Quite the read. Though:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;In a 2001 interview about his case study of the grocery-delivery site Webvan, Harvard Business School professor John Deighton said that direct-to-consumer internet advertising was here to stay, but “home-delivered groceries? Never.” There was no way to compete with supermarket efficiencies. Deighton’s prediction was — not to belabor the point — wrong.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d argue that grocery delivery never really became a mainstream business outside of certain bubbles and urban circumstances.</text></comment>