We are not in a tech bubble, we are not in a tech bubble, we are not in a tech bubble, but the overall financial market will change being impacted by these three variables; the concern of a new president, more startups are taking longer to go public and the current state of public tech companies in the market. Various Silicon Valley tech investors have debated over the last year if we are in a tech bubble or not. Tech press/media has been keeping the bubble hype conversation flowing.
Last week a great article was published on Oz titled “What’s Eating Silicon Valley” and challenges entrepreneurs to build products that’s good for the world, solving real problems versus overvalued photo sharing apps, media platforms and messaging apps. Anil dash published a similar article on building products that’s good for the world titled “Toward Humane Tech”.
There’s always a justified criticism towards Silicon Valley & Bay Area entrepreneurs who received 99% of venture and angel funding. Yes, we have our Kickstarters, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey’s who you could argue have built products that have positively had an impact in the world and a good business. But most people don’t criticize the investors as they actually have a large effect on the market of risk and opportunity manipulation over what product entrepreneurs decided to build and why. For example when Twitter raised venture capital and started to gain traction, the market and more entrepreneurs started to create more social media apps. The same for Instagram, then we saw tons of photo sharing apps. The same for snapchat, Drones and now electric cars. It all goes hand and hand or to some hand to hand; entrepreneur, product, venture capital, the market and repeat. Without funding, innovations slows and people assume entrepreneurs are not trying to build world changing solutions and solve real problems.
Now, if you didn’t know underrepresented entrepreneurs which include women.. all women receive very little angel funding and venture capital. For the most part less than 11% for women, less than 1% if you’re a black women and around 1% if your black or Latino. That’s the data. This isn’t a hypothesis but the facts, who’s receiving funding and not building products that’s better for the world and profitable? For the most part it’s not underrepresented entrepreneurs. So who’s in the bubble? Not us. Not women or Latinos or African-Americans or Indigenous Peoples because for the most part, we’re not getting funding for our innovative ideas and products solving real problems anyway.
This is where, hope opportunity and optimism comes in. Various research and data continues to show that teams that are diverse out performs teams that are not. Data also shows startups/business founded by women or more likely to be profitable and provide returns. Also hypothetically underrepresented entrepreneurs are more likely to a create real businesses solving real problems vs another me to app or service which only validation to the world is to entertain us or learn more about our intellectual compactly when and where to share a data point that will cause an emotional experience to generate an emoji.
If I was an investor, I would look at the entire market differently, I would look at every single product and entrepreneur and ask how is their product going impact the world and be inclusive. If I’m an underrepresented entrepreneur, I don’t follow the Silicon Valley, Bay area norm but I would build a product that you have identified with a business model from the bottom up. Besides.. you’re not in a bubble, they are.
No unicorns were harmed writing this post.
Post photo by Christopher Michel
Reference Links:
Why Diversity Matters via Mckinsey
