Apple Inc - today, the world’s most valuable technology corporation - went public at a valuation of just $1.19 billion in 1980, equivalent to 25 times revenue and 102 times earnings. Google - to which Facebook is most often measured against in terms of potential - was valued at $23 billion at the time of its 2004 debut, or 218 times earnings.
Today Fred Wilson writes:
We are crossing a huge chasm from an industrial society to an information society. And there is immense pain in that transformation.
Absolutely true. To have a measure of how painful that transformation will be, take a look at this table comparing employees and shareholders value.
Information age companies created 10x capital value (market cap) with 0.4x labor (number of employees) when compared to industrial age companies.
Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I don’t think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.
Much of the bubble talk surrounds five companies: Groupon, LinkedIn, Zynga, Facebook and Twitter. Mr. Thiel estimates that those five companies account for three-quarters of the value of new Web companies and, he said, five companies do not make a bubble. If they did, we have bigger problems, he said. “We need technology for our society to get better in the decades ahead,” Mr. Thiel said. “So if you say there are not even five good companies, that even those five companies are fake, that is saying that our society is completely stagnant and that nothing is happening at all.
