Rebecca Solnit on how Silicon Valley corporations are transforming San Francisco: I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path. That confidence got crushed fast. It turned out that the competition for any apartment in San Francisco was so intense that you had to respond to the listings – all on San Francisco-based Craigslist of course, the classifieds website that whittled away newspaper ad revenue nationally – within a few hours of their posting to receive a reply from the landlord or agency. The listings for both rentals and homes for sale often mentioned their proximity to the Google or Apple bus stops. [more inside]
posted by liketitanic on Jan 31, 2013 - 143 comments

Recent venture capital fund raising rounds have placed very high valuations on social media sites such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. The valuations continue to soar at an exponential pace, some placing Facebook at 75 billion and Zynga at 10 billion. Many experts have gone on record claiming this is a bubble including Eric Schmidt, Alisher Usmanov, the Russian magnate behind much of the venture capital in soical media and the Economist from last year. [more inside]
posted by FuturisticDragon on May 8, 2011 - 96 comments

Study: One in five start-ups dot-bombed "Nearly one in five start-ups backed with venture capital at the peak of the Internet boom went out of business before first-stage investors could sell their shares, costing them billions of dollars, according to a study released Thursday". Does 20% seem like too small a number to anybody else?
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Sep 20, 2002 - 13 comments

The founders of Webshots.com sold out to Excite@home in '99 for $82.5M, they just bought it back--for $2.4M. $6.7B Excite.com goes for $10M and Blue Mountain Greetings ($780M) goes for $35M. A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon we're talking more than pocket change.
posted by m@ on Jan 8, 2002 - 12 comments