I lived through both the peak and bust in the bay area the first time.    And while every crash is very different in terms of who gets impacted and how the crisis is managed, I'll share my experiences.  The dotcom crash left silicon valley with a 30% unemployment rate in the tech industry for about 6 long months.  The shape of a new crash could be very different.

- crisis: be prepared for a bloodbath: As much as no housing sucks, it sucks much much more to have no avenues for income.  A crash means that you and your boss are laid off, and so is everyone else... But also the people that were funding your company have dried up and closed shop and are out on the street as well.  And the people funding them are cutting their losses and closing up shop.   The wealthy patrons that funded your pet projects are now in the same boat as you are.  The rich and powerful people that you hated, and likewise they hated you -- now you are both clinging to each other realizing that you are in the same boat and dependent on each other.  Everything will be inverted -- all the decadence and avarice now will seem like a hazy impossible dream.

- challenge: be prepared to reposition your funding sources:  for a hackerspace, all your tech patrons may be dried up for an extended period of time.  However, it may be a good time to leverage in other industries somehow, like biotech or health care

- opportunity: you'll have a flood of really smart and talented people that now need new opportunity.  Do as much as possible to develop this human capital in creative alternative ways for the long term.

- opportunity: landlords will start dropping rent as people start leaving the bay area in droves because the rent is always too damn high.  If you can ride it out, and if you can get your funding positioned right, there will be lots of golden opportunities to acquire stuff.  For example, noisebridge was able to get it's current place during the peak of the 2008 crash

- opportunity:  we didn't have bitcoin and timebanks with wide acceptance the last couple of times......

- major challenge:  Crashes suck, but you can live through it.  A crash + ongoing natural disaster = bad shit.  If a crash and extended water crisis happen at the same time, we could be living in a totally different reality this time next year.  That said, I can't think of any better people that I'd want to live through it with!

Love,

Praveen

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 10:20 AM, mattsenate@gmail.com <mattsenate@gmail.com> wrote:

Anyone else notice that the NASDAQ Composite Index has about reached the nominal peak of the dotcom boom? It's not at the real value peak (i.e. adjusted for inflation), but still pretty peakish:

http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=COMP&insttype=Index&freq=2&show=&time=20

It seems to me that additional market forces caused by the likes of a crisis in student debt or perhaps a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, could hasten the inevitable burst. Otherwise we may be looking at just a few years before a substantial fall in the stock market, devaluation of over-inflated "tech" companies, subsided startup investment, decrease in technology field employment, or other similar things...

What might one do to prepare, as if not soon, at least inevitably there will be some stock market crash that will largely affect the wide bay area economy?

// Matt

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