"This time it's different, guys, we have the iPhone!"

I no longer have my copy of Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor," but at one point he presciently writes, "An asshole is someone who thinks the paradigms of investing can permanently shift." Or something.

The point is, The New York Times' recent story on the "not-so-exclusive" club of billion-dollar startups sounds like a case study in short-sighted investor euphoria.

As Quentin Hardy writes, "Silicon Valley entrepreneurs contend that the price spiral is not a sign of another tech bubble. The high prices are reasonable, they say, because innovations like smartphones and cloud computing will remake a technology industry that is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars."

To which I say: the term "reasonable price spiral" is an oxymoron. The tech bubble will continue to be worth billions of course -- but there will be very clear winners and losers. The pool of "look-alike" companies, most of which deal in cloud/enterprise activities, will separate itself. Every copy-cat firm hoping to make a quick billion will lose innovation steam, or people will just realize there's no point investing in a company with no revenue stream (heya, Pinterest!).

Better hit the IPO and cash out quick, guys -- what goes up in the Valley will come down on the Street.

Except you, Aaron Levie...you're cool. 

Content Wars!

Back when I was heavy in the blogging game -- from August 1 to August 10 of last year -- my brother gave me lots of snark for my buzzword-heavy talk about "media," "content," and "TV is dead."

This week brought further evidence that my predictions for analogue television were straight cookiez in the oven...Netflix released "House of Cards" to not-shabby reviews, and Apple cut a deal for the HBO Go multiscreen service. 'Twould seem that the real 'house of cards' is my brother's faith in old-school media.

As Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos notes, the point of House of Cards -- and future 'binge shows' -- is to fundamentally change the paradigm of television storytelling. Normally I'd think that's a douchey business objective, but Sarandos is a community-college dropout who clawed his way through the home-video store ranks to become Hollywood's biggest disrupter. That unexpected resume has gotta be exponentially more frightening for old-media giants to stare into -- like IBM in the 1980s when they found out they were getting their ass handed to them by an acid-dropping, shoe-less maniac.

Corporations are people, after all -- they fear what they don't understand.