"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." - Warren Buffett

Weak correlation. The bad actions at Zenefits were going on several years ago. The same was true of Theranos, their ill behavior goes back nearly to the beginning of the company.

There may be somewhere between 250 and 300 total billion dollar "unicorns" at this point. So far as I've seen the last two years, the Zenefits companies are still rare.

The money parade doesn't end until the Fed pulls the plug on hyper low interest rates. It started there and it ends there, as it did the prior two easy money periods of time (late 1990s and mid 2000s). Until then, the trillions in cash sloshing around will keep seeking better returns via various forms of higher risk speculation.

There was a thread a few days ago called "Who's Firing?" that seemed like kind of a spoof. Suddenly it seems more relevant.

It has nothing to do with bubbles. They started doing it years ago to grow faster. There are some good articles about what happened.

I reminds me before the 2001 crash I remember at the height reading a 3 inch long story in the WSJ mentioning that a business school professor did background checks on a 100 tech startups. Found 1/3 of them had CEO/COO/CFO's or board members that had been prosecuted previously for securities fraud.

Perhaps it's the same guys from 2001 pumping and dumping but have found a clever way to avoid the SEC by keeping a private equity market that only VC's have access to so they can play hot potatoes until a unicorn IPOs

Oh that's a really good suspicion.

There's a profit incentive at all stages of growth and economic strength.

Since the sort of dip last year it seems the clock is ticking. Look at unicorns that were about to IPOnin Q1. AppDynamics got bought by Cisco, other moved their plan to somewhen 2018 IPO. You read about more lay-offs then in previous times. Something is going on, maybe a deflation or a slower beginning of a bubble burst.