Tech bubbles, tides, and earthquakes - What you should know
Are we in a tech bubble? Yes. When will it burst? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. Mike Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, has a great story today “We're In A Terrible Blubble”. It is insightful and entertaining.
Context & Ripple Effects
The bubble question has become a running serial rather than a one-off call. Five years ago the same argument played out as Bubble V. Boom?, with the companion claim that the real Bubble 2.0 was in media, and last month SmoothSpan reframed the practical question as how to ride the bubble instead of predicting its end.
What makes this installment notable is the alignment: Don Dodge answers 'yes' while conceding nobody can time the burst, Mike Arrington publishes his 'We're In A Terrible Blubble' piece the same day, and Fred Wilson's A VC picks up the same thread, noting he has been writing about the word 'bubble' for the past year. When the bulls themselves concede the label, the debate shifts from whether to when — and even 'when' is off the table.
First-order effects
- Investor sentiment now anchors on a rare three-way consensus — Dodge, Arrington, and Wilson all accept the bubble framing — which removes the denial stage that earlier cycles went through and puts attention on positioning rather than prediction.
Second-order effects
- Founders and backers take the SmoothSpan lesson literally: if the burst cannot be timed, the rational move is to structure fundraises and exits to survive volatility rather than to wait out a correction, changing how rounds are sized and staged.
Third-order effects
- If the 2006 and 2011 episodes are the pattern, the bubble-or-boom argument is a standing feature of each capital cycle — a recurring media-driven self-assessment that TechCrunch, now with Arrington inside AOL, is positioned to amplify every time valuations heat up.
The trend: Each venture capital cycle revives the same bubble-versus-boom debate, with participants increasingly conceding the bubble exists while treating its timing as unknowable by design.