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wtf. If you live in Europe, you should be selling Euros and buying property in London/Germany/USA, and prepare for the collapse of fiat currencies.

if the ECB prints to bailout the PIIGs, it'll cause hyperinflation, and the disparity between the 99% and 1% will widen.

Already the drums of war are beating for Syria (a proxy for Iranian war, and control of the oilfieds around the Strait of Hormuz) to distract the masses from the inevitability of economic collapse, whether it be in the short, or medium run.

#occupyWallStreet is the shapes of things to come.


This is really smart advice :) buying property in London.


if the EZ fails, there will be a liquidity crisis, and IPO runways will have to be extended, so all seed to mid-stage startups will go bust over the next 8 months, as their cash dwindles, and they can't get financing. Expect massive layoffs in the web 2.0 space, if it happens.

Cash is king. Conserve it.


"if the EZ fails" - Ok, if it fails...

"there will be a liquidity crisis" - Ok, yes

"IPO runways will have to be extended" - Probably

"all seed to mid-stage startups will go bust over the next 8 months" - Wait, what? How did you arrive at this conclusion? By what do you infer this? Yes, liquidity may get crunched and runways may go long, but you've taken one set of results and taken it way past the likely outcome.

I do understand the thinking that cash may dwindle, but you're assuming far too much here.


seed funding usually provides an 18 month runway before more financing is needed. Mid stage runways are for a 2-5 years. You had a seed/angel funding bubble in 2010, so those companies are likely close to the end of their runways now, so they will need a cash influx. If there is a liquidity crisis, it'll be highly unlikely for them to get funding.

Also, they is still alot of inventory (mid stage web startups) from the 2007 funding bubble to work through.

Mid stage companies, funded in 2007, and had a 2-5 year runway, were waiting on the recent IPOs (Groupon, LinkedIn, Pandora, Zynga, ..) to raise appetite for their stock, but Groupon & LinkedIn, and Pandora IPOs are busts. So the capital markets will likely be closed off to them, and their will have to turn to the secondary markets. But once again, if there is a liquidity crisis, they will not get funding, and they will face a cash squeeze over the next 9-12months, depending on their burn rate.

So you have two web bubbles that will collapse, if the EZ fails. The 2007 funding bubble (digg, etc), and the 2010 angel funding bubble.


It's possible, but difficult to predict. Back in 2008 Sequoia famously predicted startup capital would dry up, but it didn't come to pass. (http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-times...)

Of course, the rise of super angels probably played a large role in that.


groupon is a pseudo ponzi scheme. For any market X there exists a high variability for profitable, volume adjusted, daily deals (resource {R}), which people want. After time t, the most desired deals r in resource R are exhausted, leaving behind lesser deals (deals which make substantially less revenue-share). So as t >> T, only less desired deals remain for market X, hugely eroding profits margins, given the high fixed cost to set the deal. So the only way to maintain margins is to enter a new market Y, where r (very profitable daily deals) is in high supply. But eventually this market will be exhausted of r, and margins will again collapse. Therefore Groupon must continually enter new markets to maintain margins, which it has been doing. But there are only a finite number of markets. So eventually Groupon will collapse. This is an intrinsic problem of the daily deals market. Google may overcome it, if it can implement it's near field communication strategy, or automate the bidding process. But other daily deals site, like Living Social, with high employee counts, are bound to fail.


You make a good point. But this is only true if all sellers are putting their items in Groupon. In a sane market, there will be only few sellers which want to make daily deals, and also few buyers which want to take them. I don't know the market, though, but this model can work.


Well said. I call it Grouponzi.


There are literally thousands of vendors in the city of chicago. It would be years even if someone wants to do a second groupon. I dont get your logic behind market getting exhuasted.


Is there a reason why deals are finite?

Surely a restaurant (for instance) can run a Groupon deal once every few months?


I would argue that the only infinite supply of deals are deals where the profit margin is so high that it supports profit at 50% off plus Groupons cut.

A restaurant does not have 300% profit margins, so long term a restaurant cannot support this model. Only service businesses, or businesses with fixed costs with low variable costs per additional customer, can be on there.


Restaurants have very high fixed costs and 60-70% margins (basically, the food) so even with a 50% cut to Groupon, they can usually make it work. With a 20-40% cut to Groupon, they can make it work without much deal overage or return customers.


But I thought the main premise of Groupon is that the deal brings people in and the <fill-in-the-blank> from the business brings people back. I guess a deal could be run again to capture new customers but it's hard to imagine the need if the initial brought in customers and more importantly, brought back customers.


This feels a little like saying "Once you've run an advertisement then why would you ever need to run another one?"


Any stats out there on a company that has done more than one daily deal an their resulting numbers? I would suspect diminishing returns, lots of people that took the first deal and weren't converted into customers coming back for another big discount.


Since Groupon keeps 10-50 cents of every deal dollar, how is it remotely like a ponzi scheme?


And how many of these companies are EBITDA profitable, and not lifestyle companies.

I remember the business week cover of Kevin Rose, which gave a similar mythos-narrative. But Digg never lived up to the hype. It flamed out.

But in a gold rush, you make money selling the dream


you'd have to adjust for cost of living.

Someone living in SanFran, or New York will get paid multiples than someone in the Midwest for the relatively same skill set.

Your survey may suffer from selection bias, if most of the respondents are from the major tech hubs, or are working in startups.


It was the best of times (Silicon Valley). It was the worse of times (rest of country).


I think it's just that everything that people once thought valuable has become a commodity, so only intelligent people prosper ;)


yeah, you can get something like this to the front page of reddit easily, if you and a couple of guys use a tor browser, and create fake logins, and upboat the content.

Reddit doesn't have good defenses against tor browsing. Tor browsing/hack is the best way to beat reddit defences, since you can circumvent reddit's IP logging, and cookies.


yeah,

but you can program your bots to train the spam filters. Nothi8ng annoys the user base more than false-positive spam filtering.


yes. Tumblr will overtake facebook in 3 years.


nah. different beasts entirely. tumblr doesnt know who I went to college with.


you're in the wrong demographic. remember, when you were in college, and on facebook. Then your parents, and 'old' people started to join.

Sorry to say this, but you're considered the old person for the tumblr user base. Alot. Alot of 12-17 yr olds are on it. If you're in junior high, or high school all your friends are on it. And they will pull ppl in, like facebook did.

facebook has become the new email. And just as stale.


Email isn't stale. It's a default. Facebook is on its way to being the same.

Tumblr? Not a definite need there.


It'll be a neglible effect. The startup bubble will only hurt angels/VCs who continue to dump money into shitty/me2 companies, so they can collect their 10% management fees.

The real bubble is in commodities. All the extra $$$ the Fed is pumping into the US economy is leaking into the emerging markets, where banks can get a better ROI on their bets, instead of investing in US small businesses.

This asymmetry between the stagnant developed economies, and the bustling emerging markets may lead to global stagflation, from high inflation, and high unemployment.

The effects will be increasing political instability throughout North Africa/Middle East, that could enter Europe visa via her large North African diaspora.

Also, China may have to take greater action curbing its money supply, which could push the all resource-centric countries (Chile/Australia/Canada) into recession.

The solution is to incentivize big banks to give out more loans to small US business, which make up the bulk of US employment, instead of making abstracted bets on financial instruments.

The American financial system is broken, and with it American capitalism, because capital isn't reaching the most product parts of the economy. Rather, it's going to lucrative, short term bets, that may be unproductive for the economy in the LONG run.


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