Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 18, 2023

It will be explained in school — in history class.

Don’t lie to your little girl, Mike.

Her so-called “mother” has done enough of that to last a lifetime!!

Off-topic, but do you know what I think is kind of odd? I remember seeing, last week, a discussion thread with at least 50 posts, but when I look back at last week, it’s nowhere to be found. Yep, that’s what I think is kind of odd, all right.

This is somewhat similar to the sky-high valuations, funding and creation of some of today’s “unicorns”…

We have hindsight. Then came the “dot bomb.”

1998. Not too long before the Great Tech Implosion…

and when you’ve got enough you can buy an over priced social media company and run it into the ground.

…This time it’s different…

My Dad always said, “You have to spend money to make money.” It seems rich people need to spend other people’s money to make people “think” they are making money.

I love it . The awakening is shadowed out.

“Sure, it’s burning money like a dollar-fueled flamethrower now, but it might just hit it big tomorrow! We’ll buy it!”

.

I guess the dumbest idea in the world can look smart when you’re blowing someone else’s money on it.

And takes a couple of decades for investors to figure out that it is untenable.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994.

It went public in 1997 and turned its first profit—1¢ per share—in the last quarter of 2001.

So yes, that’s the Silicon Valley business model.

Ahh, well, that explains Twitter these days.

I first heard the business term “burn rate” when I took a contract job with a small pharma company that was developing a cancer treatment. The plan was to create the treatment and see it through clinical trials, then get FDA approval and sell it to a big pharma company that would do manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and all that stuff. As it happened, no FDA approval, and soon, no company.

And here we are 25 years later, and this still isn’t explained in school.

This strip is so true. Amazon lost money quarter after quarter, but investors were all in, while some competitors, like BestBuy, were actually MAKING money, but weren’t investment darlings.

One of the bizarre footnotes of the .com era. A fish oil company declares that it’s going to switch to a .com and it’s stock doubles overnight. Quietly craps out a couple of years later.

https://www.forbes.com/2001/01/09/0109zapata.html?sh=74dbd21f3a8b

Save them, Alex.