I think if you're running a big company you have to be cautious about what you say in public. If you're just an investor you can take more risks.
Spending a decade publishing essays that got port-scanned by forum trolls has also helped. It has trained me to make sure what I'm saying is true before I hit submit. (Or at least within a few minutes of hitting submit; I added the delay feature to HN explicitly for this purpose.)
I did not even realize that the delay feature existed. Neat!
>It has trained me to make sure what I'm saying is true before I hit submit.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about how talking to her was forcing me to research more, and how that was good. Anytime I'm talking to this friend [via email], I'll spend quite a bit more time researching than I do actually writing.
This is one of the many reasons I love HN so much. It's filled with staggeringly brilliant people, and it forces me to go out and learn things before submitting.
I thought it was great that you dropped in on Hacker News — something like this is exactly the kind of low-cost commentary we need from some of the leaders of the valley from time to time.
I feel like there are at least a few disagreements about the state of a tech bubble in the valley. I mean, the poll got a few votes, so it's an issue worth noting — right? Then again, that probably comes from a significant amount of inexperience on my end. But I feel like your opinion is valuable even outside of the subset of the conversation in Hacker News. (Maybe we need a Bolzanno-Weierstrass analogy for discussion within specific venues and the discussion in the valley as a whole.)
I just think something like this is an easy way to get your opinion on the matter without having to get in front of you and waste your time on an issue that isn't exactly pressing. I mean, I don't know how I would feel if reporters hounded me every day asking if I still believed there was a tech bubble. But it's still an issue that obviously a lot of people care about and like to read about.
Anyway, my two cents. But, like I said, I'm pretty inexperienced when it comes to this whole "silicon valley" thing.
Spending a decade publishing essays that got port-scanned by forum trolls has also helped. It has trained me to make sure what I'm saying is true before I hit submit. (Or at least within a few minutes of hitting submit; I added the delay feature to HN explicitly for this purpose.)