Steve Rubel notes an accelerating trend of companies being added to the TechCrunch DeadPool. Six were added last quarter, and seven have been added just this month.
The trend is going to continue, as I wrote about in a post on TechCrunch. But it’s a good thing - In the bubble, companies never went out of business, until everything popped on Friday, April 14, 2000. Letting off a little steam is healthy, and lets underutilized assets (people) move on to more productive things.
As I had commented on Steve’s site, I don’t see this reported uptick in closed businesses as being anything dramatic like a “popped bubble”. You can’t expect every business to be a success - period. That these companies may have been Web-focused and attracted venture capital money makes them newsworthy, but it’s all part of the Valley’s cycle.
A mix of people getting bored + companies running out of money + VCs demanding results = deadpool grows faster.
Say, what happened to the Dead2.0 guy? He would be having the time of his life now. I remember in one of his last posts he was asking “does it matter who I am?”.
I guess it did matter to him.
Despite seeing these companies shutting down, there is still a lot of steam. The hot job market (including signup bonuses) and the money intensively raised by start up (coming from VCs) are early signs of a bubble.
So, I see it as the beginning of the bubble, rather than its burst.
(I detailed about my point of view in my blog.)
I personally believe that the dead pool is a lot larger than it currently shows. It would be a worthwhile experiment if a bunch of people could contact all the companies on the Techcrunch index and see if they are still operating/further developing their companies. Such an experiment would help answer the oft-repeated question of whether Web 2.0 is a bubble.