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A comment on Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed.

Re:Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed by marcus_holmes on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @04:42AM (#8452481)
I remember the dot-com bubble and how it all went really bad really quick.

I still haven't heard any convincing reason why "this time it's different".

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Re:Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed by bello on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @05:01AM (#8452532)
It's different because this time it's VC money, not people's savings.

When a company is listed, the stock price better reflect the actual market value of the company (otherwise a dot-com bubble happens). However, if rich VCs like to bet on startups, that's expected to be a high-risk investment.

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Re:Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed by davidw on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @05:12AM (#8452558)
The Dot Com bubble was VC-fueled too. Probably more so than this go-round, because it took more capital to start most kinds of companies back then.
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Re:Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed by bhouston on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @05:07AM (#8452544)
> it's VC money, not people's savings.

Well, technically VC money is people's savings, usually parts of pension funds I believe.

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Re:Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed by lmm on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @07:15AM (#8452851)
A little of it is pension funds or sovereign wealth funds, but most of it is from high-net-worth individuals. Investors are required to be financially sophisticated; they know the risks they're taking.
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Re:Last Time It Was This Crazy, the Stock Market Crashed by smt88 on Tuesday October 14, 2014 @05:18AM (#8452581)
If VCs lose all their money, it won't be anything new. Only a tiny fraction of VCs provide a return, after you take out the managers' fees. Large firms pump money into VCs almost charitably or as a PR thing -- they rarely expect much out of it, and their portfolios certainly aren't made or broken by their VC bets.
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