[dmix]

> Oh, that's right. It's 1999 all over again.

I've read this same comment so many times over the last 4 years on hacker news my instinct is to downvote it automatically.

Sure you made a good point about the article mentioning capital raised, not revenue/profit.

But how does constantly comparing now or last year or 2008 or 2007 to the dotcom boom adding any value to this or any discussion?

[davidhansen]

You've also probably seen thousands of variants on "what ever happened to do no evil?" posted to myriad Google articles over the years, as well. Such is the nature of discussion. Sometimes the same idea in a slightly different context is unique enough to qualify for positive value. Does my comment qualify? I don't know.

I will just note that some of us lived through the dot com bust, and we remember quite clearly what the mentality was like, especially for insiders. For us, the environment today is damn near identical to what it was like then; we just had slower connections and hardware. When we post semi-snarky comments like this, we do it partly as a warning. Profits do matter. At some point, the kids will realize it.

[pg]

I lived through the the dot-com bubble, and the environment today is nothing like it was then. No one is claiming now that there is a "new economy." Investors are not afraid to put their money in bonds, for fear they'll miss out on a new, transformative sort of growth in equities. LP money isn't flooding into new VC funds. VCs aren't funding MBAs with business plans.

dmix's instincts are right; saying it's 1999 all over again is just a facile put-down.

[quique]

We posed a "?"...our goal is to increasingly focus on impact: would love to show profit and positive social externalities... I hear you that it's frothy and too many me-too things going on that are targeting the tip of Maslow's hiearchy for the top <.5% of people