Startup blood in the water

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/heavily-funded-seattle-software-startups-cut-staff-possible-sign-cooling-market/

That's right techo's.. it's coming.. The popping bubble soon.

I also predict a sharp decline in beard balm, artisanal pickles, bacon jam, and hair bands (for man buns).

tech people don't really have the time to be hipsters. Maybe our marketing or sales people, but certainly not dev's. Hipsters started in Brooklyn, not a tech startup hub.. Do you know what you are talking about or just trying to take (funny) pot shots at a horrible group of humans?

Wait does this mean the developers will have to go outside? Like in the sun (well rain it is Seattle).

Not to concerned about 30 jobs lost between 2 Seattle startups really

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-cooling-startup-funding-chills-unicorn.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-04-14/has-the-startup-bubble-burst

Like the rest of the economy has been doing for a year now?

http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/14/shuddle-the-uber-like-service-for-getting-your-kids-around-is-shutting-down-tomorrow/

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine:

"On behalf of the entire team here at Shuddle, we are saddened to inform you that Shuddle will be ceasing operations and closing business as of end-of-the-day Friday, April 15th. We worked hard to find the financial resources that would allow us to continue to grow, but ultimately could not raise the funding required to continue operations."

Kind of sounds like lot's of businesses that are built with hopes and dreams but not so much a sound business plan and therefore can't support itself without outside help. Happens all the time, I see no reason to panic.

Yup, 'bout time all these asinine "businesses" go away. If you can't explain what you do to a 5-year-old, your business is doomed. The business plans for some of these make me question whether the "investors" were really just howler monkeys with checkbooks.

Fleecing dumb investors out of their money seems like a pretty decent business plan in my mind.

In reply to Javelin:

Nothing at all to do with the topic but you said "howler monkeys" which reminded me of this headline, which is about as good as it can get really.

Howler Monkeys with Deeper Calls Have Smaller Balls

Back to your regularly scheduled doom and gloom.

http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-house-prices-fall-redfin-2016-4

The other interesting phenomenon is that the large tech companies have started to branch out into various other cities. Google opening a dev center in Pittsburgh and Amazon opening one in Detroit. The big tech companies can't pay people enough to want to live in sf now.

The sky isn't falling. But the vc gravy train is coming to an end.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/14/fewer-deals-and-smaller-checks-startups-suffered-in-q1-as-first-time-financing-fell-31/

And then there is theranos and billions wasted.

I hear Pied Piper might go under too. Is Hooli still hiring?

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/14/fewer-deals-and-smaller-checks-startups-suffered-in-q1-as-first-time-financing-fell-31/ And then there is theranos and billions wasted.

I had so much lulz at that, the CEO had that perfectly crafted image, and it turned out that when they were giving investors tours they would tell the employees to "do sciencey-looking E36 M3" like moving blue liquid between beakers XD

Can't wait for the latest bubble to burst, I was expecting it during the first round of the marketwatch game. Just wish I could get rich during one of them and retire off of doing a little ho-hum IT work.

ohh.... the ironical's it's ironically ironicalistingly inrony generating..

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: tech people don't really have the time to be hipsters. Maybe our marketing or sales people, but certainly not dev's. Hipsters started in Brooklyn, not a tech startup hub.. Do you know what you are talking about or just trying to take (funny) pot shots at a horrible group of humans?

My brother in law is hipster patient zero. I swear he was the first one. He's out in California working at various startups. Pretty much he works til they run out of funding then he moves on. He texted my wife a few pics of him and his friends doing stuff in California. I told my wife it looked like a page from an Urban Outfitters catalog.

I was on the outside edge of the first dot-com bubble. My friends were your stereotypical geeks, stay up all night coding, sleep all day. We all looked like a roaming Star Trek convention. I was on the web side though, just making pretty websites to draw investors, the real coding was done by the smart guys.

I decided to get into tech writing just before the whole dot-com thing blew up. A friend of mine went into work one Monday to find...nothing. The building was empty. Went to his boss's house, equally empty. We figured the owner disappeared with close to half a mil of investor money. My friend had a few company computers at his house for working at home, so he sold them and considered it his final pay check. Crazy stuff.

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: ohh.... the ironical's it's ironically ironicalistingly inrony generating..

This woman is like a living Yes Men prank.

I did some side work for a friend and his professor a number of years ago who had a startup working on nuclear fusion, and called me in to do some basic work on their reactor/generator thing...now, keep in mind I have zero physics training or experience beyond an AAS degree in electronics. Most of the stuff I built used items gathered from the local Ace hardware. I never pried for details, and due to other commitments was unable to continue assisting them after a couple months, but the whole thing seemed a bit sketchy from a business standpoint. They had investors though.

GameboyRMH wrote:

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: ohh.... the ironical's it's ironically ironicalistingly inrony generating..

This woman is like a living Yes Men prank.

That's the type of egocentric arrogance that's ruined way too many companies...it also seems to be exactly what investors want to hear.

petegossett wrote: I did some side work for a friend and his professor a number of years ago who had a startup working on nuclear fusion, and called me in to do some basic work on their reactor/generator thing...now, keep in mind I have *zero* physics training or experience beyond an AAS degree in electronics. Most of the stuff I built used items gathered from the local Ace hardware. I never pried for details, and due to other commitments was unable to continue assisting them after a couple months, but the whole thing seemed a bit sketchy from a business standpoint. They had investors though.

My friend and I had the idea that we needed to make a startup work just enough to sell it off. We worked through a few ideas but never got any serious bites. We didn't want to "build our dream", we wanted to bait a hook and get gobbled up by a bigger tech company. The coolest one was the dynamic VRML site we built for selling tradeshow booths. The underlying code really wasn't revolutionary, but it was awesome to see work in the browser. That one ALMOST got us a fat check, but then the bubble burst and all the old men at the state capital put their wallets away. Some of those old guys were throwing money at anything with .com attached to it.

VRML's coming back, with WebGL + WebVR.

slefain wrote:

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: tech people don't really have the time to be hipsters. Maybe our marketing or sales people, but certainly not dev's. Hipsters started in Brooklyn, not a tech startup hub.. Do you know what you are talking about or just trying to take (funny) pot shots at a horrible group of humans?

My brother in law is hipster patient zero. I swear he was the first one. He's out in California working at various startups. Pretty much he works til they run out of funding then he moves on. He texted my wife a few pics of him and his friends doing stuff in California. I told my wife it looked like a page from an Urban Outfitters catalog. I was on the outside edge of the first dot-com bubble. My friends were your stereotypical geeks, stay up all night coding, sleep all day. We all looked like a roaming Star Trek convention. I was on the web side though, just making pretty websites to draw investors, the real coding was done by the smart guys. I decided to get into tech writing just before the whole dot-com thing blew up. A friend of mine went into work one Monday to find...nothing. The building was empty. Went to his boss's house, equally empty. We figured the owner disappeared with close to half a mil of investor money. My friend had a few company computers at his house for working at home, so he sold them and considered it his final pay check. Crazy stuff.

Gavin McInnes claims to be the godfather of all hipsters.

In regard to Elizabeth Holmes, I am genuinely curious how she was able to get where she was in the first place. She was a teenage college dropout who somehow got people to hand her a LOT of money for what is increasingly looking like an elaborate fraud. A quick wiki look does reveal a politically connected family... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

I wonder if she ever really believed her tech worked or if she is just another type of Bernie Madoff. She'll probably make some more money on her future autobiography...