Is it a bubble?
Dinner conversation with
- founder of one of the premiere ecommerce companies today who sold early
- founder and cto of one of the billion-dollar-club startups to arise lately
- meOn the one hand - lots of dumb entrepreneurs and startups
On the other hand - a lot more rational "how to take it forward" and will-never-get-an-A-roundsBut the smart guys thought lots more dumb stuff than ever. I thought, well isnt that what an evolution to a more startup-driven world would look like? I am probably wrong. From the notes to Thiel's class, talking about the 1999 mania
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All the parties, money, and IPO success stories made for lots of sketchy businesses. Those businesses were funded by sketchy VCs and run by sketchy entrepreneur-salespeople. Since everybody was running around saying pretty crazy things, it became increasingly hard to tell who was too sketchy and who wasn’t. To avoid being drawn in by slick salesmen, Max Levchin developed what he called the aura test: you listen to someone for 15 seconds and then decide if he has a good aura. If so, you continue to listen. If not, you walk away. It’s not hard to imagine that companies who employed some version of the aura test were more likely to survive the mania than those who didn’t.
//It is indeed time for those Aura Detectors again
- founder of one of the premiere ecommerce companies today who sold early
- founder and cto of one of the billion-dollar-club startups to arise lately
- meOn the one hand - lots of dumb entrepreneurs and startups
On the other hand - a lot more rational "how to take it forward" and will-never-get-an-A-roundsBut the smart guys thought lots more dumb stuff than ever. I thought, well isnt that what an evolution to a more startup-driven world would look like? I am probably wrong. From the notes to Thiel's class, talking about the 1999 mania
//
All the parties, money, and IPO success stories made for lots of sketchy businesses. Those businesses were funded by sketchy VCs and run by sketchy entrepreneur-salespeople. Since everybody was running around saying pretty crazy things, it became increasingly hard to tell who was too sketchy and who wasn’t. To avoid being drawn in by slick salesmen, Max Levchin developed what he called the aura test: you listen to someone for 15 seconds and then decide if he has a good aura. If so, you continue to listen. If not, you walk away. It’s not hard to imagine that companies who employed some version of the aura test were more likely to survive the mania than those who didn’t.
//It is indeed time for those Aura Detectors again
