Is Big Tech In Another Bubble?

“It’s different this time.”

Right now all the talk is about big tech IPOs – particularly with Alibaba completing the biggest IPO ever and companies like Uber moving towards $40 billion valuations.

Warren Buffett says that in business, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield. To this point, we would have to agree: even though it may feel like this time it is different, there may be something unexpected hidden that clouds our collective judgement. We may have another tech bubble on our hands.

Detractors will say that companies in the Dotcom bust spent too much money too fast, and that everything was speculative. That, in today’s market, companies are making real ground on revenue and earnings growth, and companies are more scalable than ever.

However, we would point out that it is many of the things that make startups scalable that also could lead to the demise of big tech. Technology moves so fast that all it takes is an idea to disrupt their business model. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in January 1999 for $3.57 billion and now Geocities does not exist. Why? Because the business model got outdated very fast – platforms such as WordPress allowed people to build sites without the embedded advertising and hosting got way cheaper. This all happened over the course of a few years, and it was a game changer.

Do we expect that companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, Lyft, Amazon, and Alibaba to be around in the same capacity in 10 years? What will their maturity look like, especially as technology continues to change? How will this affect valuations for more speculative IPOs?