评论称海外现科技泡沫：警惕虚假繁荣 抓住“酷”公司

    几个星期前，我接到了一个让我有些吃惊的电话，但是也没有吃惊到目瞪口呆的程度。我不久之前曾经写过一篇关于Arista网络公司的报道，正是这家公司的一个代表打电话给我，说他们的CEO想在公司即将举行的IPO中为我提供一点“友情股”。对方抛出的“绣球”详细到明确提出了我有机会以IPO价格购买的股份的份数。而且他特别表示，希望我明白这份好意是CEO贾什瑞•乌拉尔本人的意思。

    我拒绝了。我简单地解释说，我是不可能接受这份好意。给我打电话的这位代表就是当初与我接洽采访事宜的那一位，我能听出来他明显有点不太自在。我还告诉他，把购买这些股票的机会提供给我绝对是个坏主意。因为这家公司肯定也向其他既非公司的朋友、也非员工家属的人（比如我）抛出了类似的橄榄枝。

    这家公司现在还没有上市，我也没有从他们那里听到其它任何消息。（我5月7日给这家公司打了电话，问是否他们也为其他记者提供了IPO股份。这家公司的一位女发言人让我看了一份IPO筹资文件，上面写着存在一个定向的股权计划——此外再没什么特别的地方。）但是我挂断电话后，我意识到，现在我已经完全可以确定，我们正处在一场科技泡沫里。

    正如本文开头所写的那样，当我报道过的一家公司向我抛出购股的橄榄枝时，我并没有感到特别奇怪，那是因为我并不是第一次碰到这种事，而它正是发生科技泡沫的众多迹象之一。20世纪90年代末和21世纪初的“.com泡沫”时期，我一个供职于《圣荷塞信使报》（the San Jose Mercury News）的朋友就是由于买了“友情股”而被套牢了。（她说那位卖给她股票的CEO的确是她的一个朋友，我没有理由反驳她的这句话，不过这和重点无关。）如果市场真的“牛”到了连企业高管都愿意“跨过道德的边境”的地步，那么，它无非是表明，末日相对来说已经不远了。

    但它并不是唯一的迹象。断言泡沫是吃力不讨好的行为。有些人可能根据比较估值分析，提出私人和上市企业的价值被高估了。这种方法还好，只是不太精确，而且对确定时间没有帮助。也有人指出房地产的紧俏、付给工程师的工资上涨，或者在旧金山的热门餐馆里想订个位子都很难等等。但这些其实都是能够佐证科技泡沫的迹象。

    我用来确定科技泡沫的方法主要围绕着我的个人经验——我曾经经历了上一次科技泡沫。比如一个很好的指标就是，现在负责报道科技行业的记者职位太多了。硅谷一直是这些日子最热门的话题，不仅仅是因为《纽约客》（ The New Yorker）、《纽约》杂志（New York ）、《纽约时报》（the New York Times）等知名媒体在搞科技新闻，近年还涌现出一批专门报导科技行业的数字媒体，比如PandoDaily、The Information、Re/code和Mashable等等。这种现象反过来又促使《华尔街日报》（the Wall Street Journal ）和《彭博新闻》（Bloomberg News）等都出现了招聘科技记者的热潮。这些记者们纷纷忙着抢所谓的“微独家”，也就是新鲜、独家、具有话题性的报道。但是，这些新闻大部分除了跟少数人有关，与我们大多数人的生活几乎没什么关系。

    I was surprised but not completely flabbergasted by the phone call I received a few weeks ago. A representative of Arista Networks, a networking company I've written about recently, phoned to inform me that the company's chief executive wanted to offer me "friends and family" shares in Arista's upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit, down to the number of shares I'd have the opportunity to purchase at the IPO price. The caller specifically wanted me to understand this offer came directly from CEO Jayshree Ullal.

    I declined. I briefly explained that it was impossible for me to accept the gift that was being offered. I also told the (clearly uncomfortable) Arista rep, with whom I've dealt for stories forFortune, that it is a horrible idea to be making these shares available to me. That's because the company must be similarly propositioning other business partners who, like me, are neither a friend of the company nor family members of its employees.

    I never heard another word from the company, which hasn't yet gone public. (I phoned Wednesday to ask if other journalists had been offered IPO shares; a spokeswoman pointed me to a section of its Form S-1 filing which states that a directed share program exists -- and nothing more.) But as I hung up the phone, I realized that I finally had tangible confirmation that we are squarely in the middle of a tech-company bubble.

    At the outset of this post, I wrote that I was merely surprised by this slimy suggestion that it'd be okay for a journalist to buy into the IPO of a company he has covered. That's because, as with so many of the telltale signs of a bubble, I have seen this before. During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and early aughts, a colleague of mine at the San Jose Mercury News got into hot water for accepting a "friends and family" share allocation. (She contended that the CEO who offered her the shares was indeed a friend. I had and have no reason to doubt her assertion, which was and is beside the point.) When times are so good that executives are willing to disregard the difference between ethical and unctuous behavior, it's just one sign that the end, relatively speaking, is near.

    It's not the only sign. Calling a bubble is something of a fool's errand. Some will rely on comparative valuation analysis to argue that private and public prices for companies are overvalued. That's fine though imprecise, and almost no help in terms of timing. Others will point to scarcity of real estate, salaries paid for engineers, or the inability to nail down a reservation at a hot San Francisco restaurant. All are good tells of a tech bubble.

    Mine, however, revolve around my personal experiences of having lived through the last one. The oversupply of journalism jobs covering the technology industry, for example, is a good indicator. Silicon Valley is the hottest story going these days, and not just because The New Yorker, New York magazine, and the New York Times Magazine have discovered it. New digital publications devoted exclusively to covering technology have sprung up, including PandoDaily, The Information, Re/code, and Mashable. That, in turn, has provoked a frenzy of tech-coverage hiring at the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. All of these reporters are now competing for what a wise editor at one of these publications calls "micro scoops," stories that are fresh, exclusive, newsy -- and most likely irrelevant to all but a group of people you could count on your hands and feet.