I completely agree with this. I have been saying it for years and it gets people very angry. This is definitely a view that a minority of people that I talk to believe. Even most working class people think that the super rich drive the economy it just isn't true anymore. I think it may have been when the country was in it's early stages and mining our resources and developing infrastructure was a larger portion of our economy. I believe now that our economy is driven by the masses of consumers. Give the poor a billion dollars and a billion dollars gets put back into the economy that year. Give the rich a billion dollars and and a billion dollars goes into a mutual fund. The later has far less of an economic impact.
Guys, rich people don't keep a Scroogey-McDuck pile, large concentrations of funds make venture possible, as it lowers the marginal risk. Try having our current startup fueled cycle without concentrated wealth.
Can we really drive the human experience and technology higher by diluting our funds in an effort to normalize and support, as taxation would do creating obs the average can fill -- or should we concentrate and invest in those with the most potential?
This was really funny. I couldn't figure out if it was very very dry humor mixed with people that believed what they were saying or if everyone believed it. LOL
I remember going on the internet my senior year in high school 95. It took forever to load AOL. Then you had to listen to all the screeching to get to my favorite search engine "Web Crawler" LOL. Then it would take 5 minutes to get a picture to load on the screen. I remember people saying someday you will be able to get videos and stuff. LOL. It seemed impossible and there were a lot of people saying it would be impossible because you could never fit that much info over the network. Guess they were wrong.
I don't know if this is old news. But it seems kind of sad how far the mighty have fallen. To let your users sign in with your (old) competitors buttons. Ouch!!!
I just don’t think it is a feasible long term business model. It cost to much to employ tons of sales people to push themselves on small businesses, that don’t realize that taking a loss to drum up new business is not a good idea when all Grouponers want is to move on to the next deal. Therefore, they seldom get repeat deals with vendors (and who would after offering %75 off after discount and commission) and have to constantly look for a new (sucker) small business to work with. Not to mention they employ more writers than the New York Times, to come up with their cute little blurbs. That has to add up quick. They employ over 6000 people and growing quickly.
I think it's difficult to measure because yes, they may be taking an initial loss. But, they may gain new customers as a result of the temporary loss making it a positive.
The issue is how many customers have they conclusively gained as a result?
Newspaper/magazine ads are no different. Unlike online advertisements, it's not easy to measure.
I worked at a company that bought hundreds and thousands of ads per month and we had a difficult time measuring. You can ask the customer where they found you (which takes time and many times the customer doesn't give it to you) or you could have multiple phone numbers, which is not a good solution either.
My question is, is that enough? So if Google’s P/E is a 19.51 Facebook will IPO with a P/E of around 100. Ok that seems like a lot, right? Not really when you consider that linkedin has been trading at a P/E of 1,429.39. Purely on the social media craze. They in essence have been Riding coattails of facebook because they have been the biggest social based company that investors could get their hands on. So my prediction is a 300% increase on facebooks stock price on the first day of trading. Regardless if I think that valuation is justified or not, which I don’t. Amazon's P/E is 130. I know the hype over Facebook will make them more expensive than Amazon.
