科技泡沫时代再次来临了吗？

科技泡沫时代再次来临了吗？

 

TECH VIEW: Get Ready -- Another Internet Bubble Is Coming

10:32 AM ET 4/5/11 | Dow Jones

By Therese Poletti

Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and investors have been singing the same song for the last few years: "We really learned last time;" "It's different now;" and "You don't need that much money to start up a company anymore."

Sure, many in this wave of Internet companies have had a relentless focus on costs and are becoming profitable. But it has been rather clear, based on the skyrocketing valuations of some companies (I'm looking at you, Facebook and Groupon Inc.) that we have been seeing the beginnings of a major Internet or social-media bubble, even if it is a pre-IPO one.

That point was driven home again last week in a chorus of different voices when the New York Times had a debate called "Is This Tech Boom Different?"--a topic addressed frequently here as well. Typically, techies point out how much we have learned since the dot-com bust or that, because these companies are still private, mom-and-pop investors aren't getting hurt.

But I had a rude awakening after talking with Peter Sisson, founder and chief executive of a San Francisco-based startup called Toktumi, which develops a hosted service that gives your iPhone or Android phone PBX-like features, such as a second line.

He was concerned that we are now officially in another Internet bubble, after the start-up company Color, a company that makes a photo-sharing application for mobile phones, got a round of $41 million in funding. This news came just two weeks after Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, the phenomenally popular mobile game, got $42 million in funding.

The news about Color's funding was more of a jolt. While its founder, Bill Nguyen, is well known in Silicon Valley as a mostly successful serial entrepreneur who sold his last startup, Lala, to Apple Inc. (AAPL), the $41 million for a stealth-application company in its first round was quite a shocker. And while Nguyen told Business Insider that Color is more than just an app (which is also getting panned by some trying it out), it hasn't changed the perception that his company's funding was a watershed moment when Silicon Valley realized it is in the midst of the next bubble.

But if it is only venture capitalists and private investors who are buying Facebook's pre-IPO shares on SharesPost or the big clients of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), then it is alright if Facebook has a pre-IPO valuation of a gazillion dollars, isn't it?

As entrepreneur Jason Calacanis said at South by Southwest last month, "Right now, the only people who can get hurt are angel investors who are already rich and don't care about the money."

Not so, according to Sisson, who is on his fourth start-up himself.

"It screws things up," he said. It is already starting to get harder to hire good engineers and other jobs. "For talent, you are now competing with companies like Color with $41 million." Toktumi is in a desirable spot, in the fast-growing mobile business, with about 30 people in downtown San Francisco on a block of California Street becoming restaurant row for the Financial District. "We have lost one engineer to a company about to go public," he said.

In addition to the "hyper-competitive" market for good engineers and developers, companies with too much funding can also fuel an over-inflated Internet advertising market, with escalating prices that will hurt companies that rely only on advertising for revenue. That occurred in the last dot-com boom and bust.

There can be other issues, too, when employees start to count on the anticipated valuation of their company's stock before it goes public.

"I just get concerned when employees at companies start counting their chickens," Calacanis told the panel at SXSW. "That's where employees can get hurt," when they start calculating how much Facebook or LinkedIn could be worth and how much their shares will be worth when they go public. "And they start buying houses based on that and then they can't get out."

Paul Saffo, a long-time Silicon Valley futurist and managing director of foresight at Discern Analytics, said another new and unexplored element of the boom this time is the fact that many employees have been able to sell their shares in secondary markets such as SharesPost and SecondMarket.

"We are really in new territory here because of the growth of private placements," Saffo said. "One thing for sure is the days when founders were giving stock to their company masseuses and borrowing against their stock for houses are long gone. Or else they are dumber than I think."

Even though, for now, it is still a private bubble, there will be ramifications beyond the investor elite. And it is probably just beginning.

(Therese Poletti is a special writer for MarketWatch. She can be reached at 415-439-6400 or by email at [e-mail].)