Irrational Exuberance: A Tech Crash is Coming

These slides apply Nobel Laureate Robert Schiller's concept of irrational exuberance (and a book) title to the current speculative bubble of 2019. Over investments in startups and a lack of profitability in them are finally starting to catch up with the venture capital industry and the tech sector that relies on it. Investments by US venture capitalists have risen about six times since 2001 causing the total invested in 2018 to exceed by 40% the peak of 2000, the last big year of the dotcom bubble. But the number of IPOs has never returned to the peak years of 1993 to 2000; only about 250 were carried out between 2015 and 2017 vs. about 1,200 between 1995 and 1997. The reason is simple: startups are taking longer to go public because they are not profitable. Consider the data. The median time to IPO has risen from 2.8 years in 1998 to 7.7 years in 2016 and the ones going public are less profitable than they were in the past. Although only 22% of startups going public in 1980 were unprofitable, 82% were unprofitable in 2018. The same high percentages of unprofitability have only been achieved twice before, in 1998 and 1999 right before the dotcom bubble burst. Furthermore, startups that have recently done high profile IPOs such as Snap, Dropbox, Blue Apron, Fitbit, Trivago, Box, and Cloudera are still not profitable. Read less