So many good quotes in this article:
Vikram Mansharamani, a Yale lecturer and author of the book Boombustology, has argued that virtually every great bubble bursting has been preceded by an attempt to build the tallest buildings. Forty Wall Street, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building were under construction during the onset of the Great Depression. The Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur, were completed in time to inaugurate the Asian economic crisis. The Taipei 101 tower, once the tallest building in the world, laid its foundation right at the height of the dot-com boom.
As one technologist overheard and posted on Twitter, "SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?"
The problem with being a unicorn, indeed, is that there aren't many exit strategies. Either you can go public, which is inadvisable without a lot of revenue, or you can sell, which is difficult given the paucity of companies that can afford to make such an offer. So, for many, the choice becomes fairly simple. You continue to raise more and more money, or you die.
Now countless people from all over want this to be a bubble and they want it to burst. There are the taxi drivers who have lost their jobs to Uber; hotel owners who have seen their rooms sit vacant as people sleep in Airbnbs; newspapers that are at the mercy of Facebook's algorithms; booksellers and retailers who have been in an unrelenting war with Amazon; the elderly, who can't keep up; the music industry; television producers; and, perhaps most of all, San Franciscans, who would rejoice in the streets if their rents fell from totally insane to merely overpriced, or if they could get into a decent restaurant on a Monday night.