If there has been one way to get laughed out of a room in Silicon Valley these past few years, it is to draw comparisons between the present day and the frothy late 90s.
Do so, and you are likely to get a lecture on all the reasons why the current tech “boom” in no way resembles the tech “bubble” that burst nearly two decades ago. For starters, today’s tech companies are global behemoths with orders of magnitude more revenue than flameouts like Pets.com. We aren’t seeing the same run-up in IPO prices that we did during the late 90s. Tech, media and telecom stocks represent about 32% of the S&P vs. 45% in early 2000.
2019 is not 1999. But there is no doubt we are in a different bubble of sorts, and it’s time we recognized it.
