3 months ago you might have been mildly interested in what was going on with the market. Maybe last month it turned to genuine concern and perhaps today you are just downright scared. 1997 levels? What happened to predictable returns over a 10 to 12 year period? You might think that those days are over.
Here are two things to ponder – maybe they will make you feel better and maybe they won’t:
1) We absolutely stink at predicting. Go grab a copy of the Black Swan – we historically simply can’t predict anything well. There’s really not much sense in following what the economists say about when we will hit bottom or that there “is no bottom in sight”. Many of the economists who have turned to “doom and gloom” were predicting a short run for the bear market just a few months ago. They aren’t anymore “right” now than they were “right” then. Just don’t worry about it – we’ll climb after we hit the bottom and no one is going to predict it.  Or those that do predict it will have done so out of blind luck.
2) There’s no better time to be in a startup. If you are a private company and you’ve done the things you need to do to become or remain cash flow positive you are in a great place. Yes, your valuation likely changed with the change in the market but you’ve been artificially sheltered from it’s volatility. It’s better not to have to focus on your daily stock price if you don’t have to and private companies simply don’t have that concern!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.