* Are the startups that are hiring taking up enough of the talent compared to large established companies with billions in the bank such that if there were a bubble, and it were to pop, it would actually make an impact on the hiring environment.
I'd love to see some hard data on the % of people employed by the "startup ecosystem" vs. large established giants like Google, FB, Apple, Adobe, MS, Amazon, etc. These companies have MASSIVE hiring needs and will likely continue to for some time. Should interest rates cause lots of startups to die, I have a hard time believing it would result in a similar situation to the last dotcom bust. Salaries might be depressed for a while, but these giants would still be fighting each other to swoop up the talent.
I'd seriously love to see some hard data on how much of an economic impact it would have in the Bay Area housing market and the public markets in general if all of the funded startups were to go poof overnight. My current bet is "not much in the scope of things."
A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.
I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.
On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area (https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.
The latter has such massive hiring needs in comparison that even if funding dried up (which they do not need since they have lots of profit and are already oftentimes publicly traded), I don't think it would slow down the market THAT much.
When these tech giants have layoffs - usually in the 100s or 1000s - it's a big hit to the job market. May not be reflected on Craigslist or Dice, but there'll be a lot more job-seekers. Instead of getting 50 resumes per job posting, hiring managers would be getting hundreds.
"To big too fail" isn't a thing.
Bottom line is - hiring (or lack of) is a leading indicator of a company's financial health. A company that doesn't have any open jobs for a sustained length of time (3-6 months to a year) is in belt tightening mode - which comes right before layoffs or worse, closing shop.
Btw - Yahoo is already doing layoffs or 'downsizing'. If Yahoo wasn't hiring during the past 3-6 months, that definitely was an indicator of this.
Yahoo Downsizes In Latin America, Closes Mexico And Argentina Operations http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin-am...
Here are some news sites that track layoffs. I recommend keeping a close eye on things.
http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/
https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%2...
Or better yet, keep an eye on the Dice jobs number which is prominently displayed on the Dice.com home page.
As of today, January 29, 2016 that number is 84,201. My take is that if this number goes below 60,000 then the bubble is bursting.
What the author describe is a lavish (according to him) standard of living, judged startups to be dumb by their name/description (but they got investor money). He concludes that we are in a bubble.
Here are the metrics that matter:
* Are current startups generating enough money to pay salaries.
* Are current startups raising enough funds to make ends meet.
* Are there new startups funded.
* Is the number of exits/IPOs higher to create new millionaires.
* Is the number of failed startups higher to create new unemployed engineers and free capacity.
If someone is interested to know these numbers, maybe finance me for a couple months of research and get the right facts.