Book I'm Reading: "The Cult of We" by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

After nearly a decade in business, the company wasn’t profitable—or anywhere close. It was losing more than $3,000 a minute, on average, and had lost more than $1.6 billion the prior year. But Uber, Airbnb, and the mattress website Casper were all unprofitable. Losses were par for the course for buzzy Silicon Valley companies.

In bubbles, the herd and its collective psychology prevail over the individual. Euphoria wins out over skepticism. Beanie Babies won’t be just a fad. Housing prices will never fall again. Still more investors clamor to get in on the rising riches, pushing prices up further.

The media could have applied the brakes to the runaway train of optimism. But in 2015, Silicon Valley was by and large lionized in the press, treated with a certain deference rather than the skepticism later applied to Facebook and Amazon, once their extraordinary size and influence became more apparent.