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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Silicon Valley Bank crashed just a day ago, and many folks in the VC/startup world are freaking out. I’ve seen predictions that 50-100 different startups will go bankrupt over the next month. This could cause a contagion effect and lead to worse effects, although I’m skeptical of a major economic collapse as some doomsday prophets have discussed.

Apparently the bank was mostly into mortgage backed securities, which lost a ton of value due to the Fed’s precedented* rate hikes. I don’t know enough about finance to confidently hop on my soapbox here - @BurdensomeCount may have a better idea of what’s going on.

As this collapse mainly affects very left coded super technical folks, I don’t expect many on the right to shed tears. That being said I do think this speaks to a larger issue of growth in the economy as a whole. Tyler Cowen has famously backed the stagnation hypothesis, or the idea that overall production has been slowing down.

Tech startups have recently been the major sector looked to for economic growth, especially with all the AI/LLM hype. This collapse not only will slow the industry but shows a marked incompetence from this growth sector which may cool investment there in the future.

How can we sustain economic growth without the recent massive gains from Silicon Valley technology?

I’m of the opinion that the overwhelming majority of tech startups are overvalued and only existed as a result of absurdly low interest rates that no longer exist. Many of them would have failed eventually as a result of their inability to raise money and if this pushes some of them out sooner that’s a good thing.

More fundamentally I hope that this pushes some of the intellectual capital currently wasted on basically pointless ventures into more productive parts of the economy.

China did this explicitly a couple of years ago by straight up banning tech startups and I believe it was good policy (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-tech-giants-policy). I’m glad that interest normalization is having the same effect.

I think most people have no experience with startups and thus no appreciation for how absurdly productive a small group of unbridled engineers can be.

This is the tech bro version of the labor theory of value. I think nobody seriously disputes that a small group of unbridled engineers can be absurdly productive in creating X; the question is more like, “who the heck needs X?”

Or, in many cases, the far more fundamental question of ‘what is x and does it have potential applications?’.

I think you may give media too much credibility in portraying what startups work on.

A company like Juicero is exceptional, but it’s also not even an a priori bad idea. The rich buy all kinds of luxury goods that seem absurd to most people.

I have a $3,000 chair that provides massages that are maybe half as good as those provided by a person. The Osaki company that makes it, as far as I know, is still in good shape.

I have a robot that does a poor job of cleaning my floors and that frequently gets lost or stuck. iRobot is still around and I’m guessing profitable.

I guess the question is how often do you use your chair and how often would you get a chair massage in real life. One could imagine a pay back period in 2 years. Then provided the chair pats for say 10 years you get 8 years of half as good massages for free. Maybe now you only go once or twice a year for the real deal. Could on net be worth it.

Same with iRobot. It isn’t a replacement to cleaning generally; but can reduce the need to clean.

I live/work in the middle of all of this with what I think is a pretty good big picture view. Almost everything these guys do lately is some combination of absurd and/or hyper niche, and at the very least incredibly overvalued.

Overvaluations were at least partially corrected last summer. Lots of startups have been unable to raise new funding rounds as a result.

Though I'd argue about the definition of "overvaluation." Is something overvalued if the market has access to practically free money and just needs to park it somewhere?

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