This week, there was the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., which felt a bit like Davos for nerds, but without the walls of snow.
Helicopters, private jets and cavalcades of black Suburbans shuffle in top attendees, including Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple and Lawrence Ellison of Oracle.
Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, discusses stock prices in relation to a bubble.Each conference always seem to have a theme being discussed in the hallways. At D: All Things Digital, the change reverberating among attendees was the adjustment happening to every aspect of technology. The word of the week has clearly been “disruption.”
“Everything is being disrupted, including education, stock prices, business models and even our own industry,” said Esther Dyson, an investor and technologist, noting that the power shift with tech giants is changing. “It’s also clearly a world where you can’t count on anything anymore. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are simultaneously friends and enemies. There’s clearly a shift in their alliances.”
Tony Conrad, a partner at the venture firm True Ventures, said his discussions with the tech elite at the conference convinced him the tech industry was at a pinnacle of creation. “It feel like we’re in a “Midnight in Paris” moment where you have all of this talent creating incredibly interesting stuff,” Mr. Conrad said. “In Paris you had Hemingway, Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Here you have the top of the pyramid of the tech scene doing the same thing with start-ups and incredible new technologies.” (The “Midnight in Paris” analogy was first written about last year by Om Malik of GigaOm.)
Of course the talk of a tech bubble 2.0 did come up here, albeit quietly.
Mary Meeker, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, in a talk on stage asked the question: “Bubble — or not?” Ms. Meeker explained the latest string of initial public offerings by big technology companies are “compelling in market value,” but “not compelling in performance.” She cited Facebook, Zynga, GroupOn and Yelp, which are all trading well below their I.P.O. price.
Ms. Meeker noted that companies that have taken a cautioned, more leveled approach to raising money are trading above their initial offering price. One example she cited was LinkedIn.
I caught up with Ms. Meeker at lunch and noted that she never actually answered the question of bubble, or not. Her response, with a smile: “I didn’t have to.” She added, that the numbers in her slides speak for themselves and people should follow the example of LinkedIn. (Its I.P.O. price was $45 and shares closed Thursday at $96.10.)
Of course everyone agreed that the recent Facebook I.P.O., which came out of the gate at $100 billion valuation and just two short weeks later is painfully close to three quarters of that, will inevitably affect the industry for some time.
Josh Felser, co-founder of Freestyle Capital, said the Facebook I.P.O. has clearly given investors to be more conservative with series B or C investing with start-ups.
“I think there is a fear that the path to outrageous public market valuations is more treacherous than we all thought,” Mr. Felser said. “The I.P.O. poster child, Facebook, has been a flop and there is definitely chatter that other I.P.O.s are being delayed.”
The Facebook offering has clearly disrupted the entire technology industry.