[condiment]

I appreciate how your experience in the late 90s has given you a heuristic for picking up on the signals and leading indicators of a bubble, but I question how relevant it is in this case.

The poetry blog post is just one bad idea that a couple guys had in an attempt to gain a small amount of funding from a notable startup indicator. That's not to say that there aren't more small teams with laughable ideas out there, but I think it's important to note that nobody gave them money. I suspect they went home empty handed because the folks who manage VC funds did learn from the mistakes of the 90s, even if a new generation of wantrepeneurs have no clue.

Which brings me to my point. The niche based thinking expressed by the poetry disruptors and many others is an expression of the realization that individual programmers have the ability to work alone to create products and businesses that are capable of supporting them financially in much the same way that a sole proprietorship would in the physical world.

I'm fairly certain that this wasn't possible in the 90s without outside help, but I think that it explains a lot of the misguided enthusiasm from people who want to build lifestyle businesses, but don't realize that venture capital is not the way to go about it.