When your nephew with a purple mohawk had $2 Million in stock options from his dot.com back in 2000, that was a good sign that things were getting "out of hand". The same thing could be said about your soccer-mom neighbor who has made a fortune flipping local real estate. The emergence of "Idiot Millionaires" is always a sign of dark clouds on the horizon. Still, you don't expect to these folks among the ranks of venture capitalists. You must read this hilarious take on the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco:
Some of the perceived value comes from the fact that there are venture capitalists all over the place. If you have a great idea for the next-generation vertically integrated multimedia search engine that bases its results on social contexts, not just raw link numbers, you have a fair chance of meeting someone who will finance your startup.
For the VCs, this is a great conference because the halls are thick with promising entrepreneurs. For example, one VC told me and an O'Reilly sysadmin about how he'd found a young programmer who was developing an exciting new Web browser that had tabbed browsing, new security features, and a one-click utility that would allow users to change its look and feel to suit their personal taste. All this, the VC said, was based on Internet Explorer, the world's most popular browser. What did we think of it?
The sysadmin and I pointed out that every single one of these "advanced" features was already available in freely downloadable Firefox, so it seemed pointless to develop an IE add-on that would do the same things.
"But what about people like me, who don't know how to download Firefox?" the VC asked.
Umm ... umm ... the word "agog" could be used to describe my reaction. I mean, if someone can't figure out how to download and install Firefox, how can they download and install an IE add-on?
(No, this VC wasn't pulling our legs. He was serious. There really are people running around with money to invest who know that little.)
We've been having too many "lord help us" moments lately.
If you're not too depressed to look, check out this entry from Paul Kedrosky who says that VCs have approached him about investing in his blog paul.kedrosky.com.
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