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axiak | 6 years ago

I think the pure tech plays in 2019 are doing just fine. Zoom, Cloudflare, and Datadog all look like good companies. They're just not over-hyped and overinflated.

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i_am_proteus|6 years ago

The smoke and mirrors plays need mass hype/media blitz to "succeed." The companies that actually add value only need to market to the audiences for which they're economically relevant.

claudeganon|6 years ago

Spot on. Many of these companies have devolved into little more than pump-and-dump schemes for executive compensation. All that’s undergirding them are their BS “disruption” and PR narratives, gobbled up and regurgitated by the media.

benj111|6 years ago

This sounds slightly like a no true Scotsman arguement to me. I'm sure you could find some none pure tech plays that are successful.

Plus companies like Uber don't exactly own assets, its more tech company than not.

For all the promise of the Web, people live in the real world, that's where the money is to be made, mega tech companies are necessarily going to live at the interface.

ethbro|6 years ago

The irony is that essentially all of SoftBank's playbook is ripped from Buffett.

Except Buffett did it with non-tech, capital-heavy companies. Where it arguably works a lot more reliably.

john_moscow|6 years ago

Cloudflare still relies on the "massive amount of free users creating buzz vs. a tiny fraction of paid users". Although not an obvious scam, they may very well go the Groupon way.

akulkarni|6 years ago

This is a classic "bottoms-up" model that is quite viable (eg Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Elastic, MongoDB). Not sure why anyone would call it a scam. In fact, I would be wary of software companies without a base of free users, as that means the company needs to keep spending a lot of its revenue on sales and marketing.

pcwalton|6 years ago

That wasn't Groupon's problem. Cloudflare and Groupon have virtually nothing in common.

skinnymuch|6 years ago

What relevance does Groupon have? The two companies aren’t related in any major way. Def not with freemium model or revenue model.