
Silicon Valley startups are buying fewer $10,000 bikes as signing bonuses - justinlaing
http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-startups-buying-fewer-10000-bikes-as-signing-bonuses-2016-2
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vonklaus
This is a solid article. Steven Levitt & stephen Dumbner (of freakonomics
fame) have done a 100 year look at the high end bivycle market in the
surrounding areas of innovation hubs. They were able to predict a bubble witn
a 97.3% confidence level.

The fed released new guidance for KPIs for the economy and it is inline with
the article and the steves^2 research.

The data is pretty staggering, when you drill down on it. It would be one
thing if it was just an arbitrary observation that was so insignificant it
didn't matter while serving the authors main point of highlighting an
inciteful and weird metric the public would disagree with to make them angry.
This is not that.

Conspiracy theorists are chocking this up as just another "passing fad" and a
"good way to promote teambuilding and health", one person even alleged it was
good for the "environment" and "promoted jobs".

Startups are cutting down on these things because they are dead. VCs won't
help you raise a series E round if you are spending over 50,000 on bikes.

It is important to realize all startups are doing poorly. If you look at
google, apple, a bootstrapped mobile games company and stealthmode blockchain
as a service company leveraging the gopher protocol with a fax caching layer,
you will see that essentially:

1\. All companys with a website are in tech.

2\. All companies started after Alan Turing are startups.

3\. Having a website AND having an email address at your domain means you are
an Internet Company.

Also, the bubble is strictly tech, the "bike slowdown" is localized, we don't
expect:

Insbility to correct economy with monetary policy due to a normalized %0
percent int rate.

Inability to correct fiscal policy due to no money.

To be an issue going forward.

Its nice to see these pieces of shit in tech get what is coming from them, an
unnamed source qouted in the article from winterell, stated that winter was
coming snd:

>The message of more caution is not lost on all start-ups. Some are cutting
back

However, they did give this one helpful qoute:

> board meeting conversations began shifting significantly at their companies
> to focus on reaching profitability

The bubble is bursting. Companies that were likely to succeed and provide a
net good to the world are over, tech culture is over, do you think there is a
need for companies to even do accounting?

So in summation:

[ screenshot of bike ]

People are buying less bikes*

Tech companies forced to consider having a "plan" and "runway"

*possible correlation with 200 people in the world who have them don't need more.

