Market Resiliency and the Spector of Exogenous Shocks

There’a a lot of bubble talk again. I’m so confused now I don’t know what to make of it. Here’s what I do know: This is a big up market. There’s a lot of money in the angel and seed and crowdfunding markets. Depending on what stats you believe, the number of microVC funds with $50M or less has exploded in the last few years. And, we have all read that there’s more money moving into the late-stage private markets, with institutions like hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and all sorts of people clamoring to get a piece in the next Airbnb — including Airbnb.

Yet, on the other hand, we are living in a time of (1) technology proliferating into the real world and (2) the simultaneous development of groundbreaking platforms….we all know this, but consider that mobile phones are making the largest market the world has ever seen; or that Uber, Snapchat, and Apple’s iOS ecosystem and mobile efforts are pushing technology out into the real world, all around the Earth; and that besides mobile computing spreading with better and fancier sensors, we have drones (an estimated $100B market over the next 8-10 years); innovation in financial technology and automation, like the Blockchain, which despite the ups and downs, could be incredibly disruptive; we have crowdfunding across a number of verticals. I could go on and on.

I personally tend to agree w/ Albert’s assessment, here. I’ll quote his closing paragraph:

Because [this period of private growth] is happening gradually and because the logic looks internally consistent (and add to that the low interest rates), this could continue to go on for quite some time. This strikes me as the classic case of Nassim Taleb‘s point about fat tailed distributions where it is the higher order moments (kurtosis) that really matter. So the process looks very smooth and gradual for quite some time until there is a sudden and fairly violent swing.

All this said, we are all analyzing what we know. What about the unknowns. What about an exogenous shock to the system, even if the system is resilient? I know we cannot predict that, but it is a part of life, and any analysis should also include those potentially known unknowns the exogenous shocks:

Geopolitical, general unrest could foment in parts of the world as it has for the past 4-5 years. To date, the U.S. has been isolated from this.
Macroeconomic, like how the price of oil just dropped. People say “the macro” doesn’t affect technology innovation, and that is true, but it does affect capital markets, and that could have an impact on crowdfunding, smaller funds, and IPO markets.
Natural Disasters, a calamity on the scale of Sendai/Fukushimia (let’s hope not) on the west coast would rattle business as usual.
Adjacent Bubbles, such as student loan debt could mount and cause instability in other financial institutions.
Shifts In Power, as in what we will have next summer in America, leading into the 2016 election.
Loss of Public Market Confidence, Albert commented back on Twitter that it could also be a few public companies which slow growth and perhaps even stall that triggers this, so we have another possibility.