Can the Media Please Stop Referring to Company Size by Valuation?
The following tweet is the umpteenth time I’ve seen the media size a company by valuation, not revenue, in the past few years: Call me old school, but I was taught to size companies by revenue, not market capitalization (aka, valuation). Calling Palantir a $20B company suggests they are doing $20B in revenues, which is certainly […]
Unicorrection
We’ve had a correction in Unicorn financing that has trickled throughout venture capital. A lot of people lost jobs, opportunity and wealth. You could say this began with the creation of a the secondary market for private equity, and the dust on Chris Sacca’s spurs. But the correction began with Fidelity’s very public markdown […]
Introducing a New SaaS Metric: The Hype Factor
I said in yesterday’s post, entitled Too Much Money Makes You Stupid, that while I don’t have much of a beef with Domo, that I did want to observe in today’s fund-to-excess environment that any idea — including making a series of Alec Baldwin would-be viral videos — can sound like a good one. While I credited Domo with […]
Too Much Money Makes You Stupid — Let’s Make an Alec Baldwin Viral Video
There are two sayings I like when it comes to the unicorn bubble: “Too much money makes you stupid” “Any idea’s a good one when you’ve got $100M burning a hole in your pocket.” Startups are supposed to be focused. Startups are supposed to need to prioritize ideas and opportunities. Just as startups weren’t supposed […]
Kellblog Predictions for 2016
It’s time for another set of predictions, but before diving into my list for 2016, let’s review and assess the predictions I made for 2015. Kellblog’s 2015 Predictions Review The good times will continue to roll in Silicon Valley. I asserted that even if you felt a bubble, that it was more 1999 than 2001. While IPOs […]
Unicorn Tears, Beyond Ultimate, and the Silicon Valley Hype Mentality
Back in the day we working on a press release and I was a CMO. Me: “Somebody, get Randy (the PR director) in here.” Me: “Randy, what is this press release calling our new offering the ultimate in business intelligence?” Randy: “Yes and the problem is?” Me: “The problem is it’s not the ultimate, it’s […]
The Content Bubble and the Greater Fool
There’s an old saying: if you can’t make money at your business then you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. What happens when we have an economy of hobbyists?
The Curse of the Megaround
With what everyone seems reluctant to call a bubble in late-stage, private financing in full swing, I thought I’d do a quick post to drill into a concept I presented in my 2015 predictions post, something I call the curse of the megaround. We will do that by examining the forces, and the winners and losers, […]
The Great Reckoning: Thoughts on the Deflation of Technology Bubble 2.0
This post shares a collection of thoughts on what I’ve variously heard referred to as “the tightening,” “the unwinding,” “the unraveling,” or “the great reckoning” — the already-in-process but largely still-coming deflation of technology-oriented stock valuations, particularly in consumer-oriented companies and particularly in those that took large, late-stage private financings. The Four Horsemen Here are […]
Kellblog’s 10 Predictions for 2014
Since it is the season of predictions, I thought I’d offer up a few of my own for 2014, based on my nearly three decades of experience working in enterprise software with databases, BI tools, and enterprise applications. See the bottom for my disclaimer, and off we go. Here are my ten predictions for 2014. Despite various ominous […]
