Very interesting notes in relation to the "tech bubble" talk:
Yesterday, the folks at Andreessen-Horowitz released a slide deck on their reasoning why “this time it is different” on tech funding and bubbles. It is worth a little of your time but here are the take aways:
The amount of money going into tech start-ups is still much less than it was in the dot.com bubbleof 2000. Indeed, as a share of GDP funding has been flat since that time. It is also flat as a function of people online.
However:
The tech funding is heavily geographically concentrated. We know that this is the case with entrepreneurial activity (see here) and I think it is becoming more so.
That means that while an economy-wide view of funding shows flatness in the aggregates, I wonder if we did just a Silicon Valley analysis, it would look like this. My guess is that funding from Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley has increased.
Given this, I think the heart of the move to earlier stage funding is doing hand in hand with the increase in wealth concentration...