Photo by La Eneida

It is 7 a.m., 50° and headed to 57° and raining again! Details for the next 10 days are here.

SF Gate ran a story yesterday on Oakland as the new hub for tech start-ups. Interesting comment by Brennen Byrne, who began in the start-up world in SOMA and likes the diversity of Oakland. I had an appointment last week in SOMA and felt the same way returning to the Mission. Everyone in SOMA seemed under 40, male and appeared particularly dextrous at checking a cellphone while walking. Nothing against men under 40, but it felt a little like being on a well-heeled campus.

Brian Singer, a graphic designer, took his texting while driving campaign to another level, putting up billboards across the city, including one in the Mission District where he met with a reporter from CBS local to talk about the campaign.  

A piece in the Sunday NYTs by Jeff Sommer explains how 2014 does and doesn’t feel like the last dot.com bubble. How it does: Facebook’s $19 billion for WhatsApp and $2 billion for Octulus VR, both companies with modest sales. A look at the revenue for tech start-ups purchased recently, however, proves that they aren’t as dismaying as those for biotech start-ups.

In the first quarter this year, 45 percent of all companies that conducted initial public offerings were in biotech and not a single one reported “positive earnings,” according to Professor Ritter, who is an authority on I.P.O.s. In other words, they all lost money, yet they were valued at a median of $199 million.

Half of those biotech I.P.O.s had no revenue at all. For those that did have some, their median 12-month sales amounted to only $200,000, he said. That compares with a median of $125 million for nonbiotechs with initial offerings. READ MORE TO SEE HOW THIS BUBBLE DIFFERS. 

Stay dry!

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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1 Comment

  1. It’s in the nature of biotech that there has to be a large investment for many years before any revenues come in. So the fact that biotech IPO’s happen before the revenues is hardly an indicator of any “bubble”.

    To the other, what is wrong with a place feeling like a campus? Aren’t you an academic?

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