> is there something else at play that I’m missing…?
Depending on the stage, investors don't care about any of the details except for the founders ability to raise the next round and their probability to IPO at a later/advanced stage. The stock is the product and whether you are selling a real time machine or a crystal is irrelevant.
Which is not that "insane" really. If that's how money is being made, and investors are in the business of making money, then that's the path they are going to take.
> The stock is the product and whether you are selling a real time machine or a crystal is irrelevant.
This is the right answer, some people think that the dot-com bubble and mortgage bubble is something for investors to regret, when in fact they made such a ridiculous amount of money they're just searching for the next bubble. Not the next great product.
I agree with you, it is risky, I have no insights into the data but I would imagine that those risks are being calculated with previous W/L taken into account.
We all know there is no 'sure thing' when investing, but if you're a large money manager, you generally want to maximise profits, looking through history, the 'quickest' earners are usually always those from OP, speculation, market share and IPO.. The 'bubble' of these seems to be loosing air but I'm purely speculating based on the tech job market so I could be completely wrong.
There's a point of view that smart investors did, and dumb investors were left holding the bag.
If that's your belief, then thinking it's risky and you may lose your shirt requires believing that you may not be smart. Which is a tough thing to accept for a lot of people, especially ones who think investment success is all about smarts and not luck.
Markets (like most human systems) aren't really 'supposed' to do anything: they've just kind of evolved as various participants in the market have found them useful for different things, and competition between systems has selected for characteristics that allow them to survive. Economists mostly describe systems, ideas like efficient markets are more of a post-hoc hypothesis for why the system survives, not an up-front designed attribute of the system that was desired when it was set up.
(which basically means that if the conditions mean that the optimal strategy in the market is to basically just run pump-and-dump 'greater-fool' scams on everyone else then that's what you'll see occur)
Depending on the stage, investors don't care about any of the details except for the founders ability to raise the next round and their probability to IPO at a later/advanced stage. The stock is the product and whether you are selling a real time machine or a crystal is irrelevant.
Which is not that "insane" really. If that's how money is being made, and investors are in the business of making money, then that's the path they are going to take.