Startup nostalgia: zero rates, NFT millions, and the valuation crash

Description

The image is a screenshot of a tweet from the account "Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. @ParikPatelCFA". The tweet text reads: “We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch. We had zero rates. We had unlimited startup funding. We had soaring valuations. We had JPEGs that sold for millions. We had everything we needed and it all ran like clockwork.” Below the tweet is a still from Breaking Bad where two bald characters (faces blurred) confront each other in a desert setting, underscoring the intensity of the rant. Technically, the meme riffs on the post-ZIRP macro shift: cheap capital, hyper-growth valuations, and the NFT frenzy that once fueled infinite runway for startups, all now gone. Senior engineers will recognise the sarcastic lament for an era when VC money flowed freely, JPEGs masqueraded as assets, and every metrics dashboard pointed “up-and-to-the-right.”

Common Tags

StartupCulture Startup TechHypeCycle Nft BlockchainHype VentureCapitalFunding IndustryTrends IndustrySatire

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Remember when our risk model was literally `money.free()? true : pivotToAI();` - turns out that branch just hit production

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Remember when our risk model was literally `money.free()? true : pivotToAI();` - turns out that branch just hit production
Anonymous

The only thing more volatile than our microservices in production was watching our Series B valuation evaporate faster than a Redis cache after someone forgot to configure persistence - turns out 'move fast and break things' also applied to the Fed's monetary policy
Anonymous

Ah yes, the ZIRP era - when your Series A pitch deck could literally be a JPEG of a monkey, your burn rate was a feature not a bug, and 'path to profitability' was just a theoretical CS problem you'd solve eventually. Now we're all debugging our cap tables in production while the Fed's interest rate hikes are throwing unhandled exceptions across the entire startup ecosystem. Turns out 'move fast and break things' works great until the things breaking are your runway calculations and the 'fast' part is how quickly investors ghost your emails
Anonymous

We hard‑coded ZIRP as a global singleton; when the Fed shipped a breaking‑change release, every valuation microservice started throwing 500s and the JPEG service dropped to 0 QPS
Anonymous

Peak blockchain scalability: mint infinite JPEGs on one chain, dump liquidity across all others
Anonymous

Someone toggled off the global ZeroInterestRates feature flag and half the stack threw NullCapitalException - turns out our ‘scale’ was just DependencyInjection(VentureCapital)
@SamsonovAnton 2y

Calling in the explanation squad! Explanation squad, come in! Over.
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

Also those images what were they really? Bitmaps or vector graphics or jpegs? Like the ones I saw had no obvious compression artifacts at a first glance.
1. dev_meme 2y
  
  It doesn’t touch topic of any issues with jpegs. Instead, it’s just a common word to describe any kind of picture "on blockchain"
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  Yes I understood but my question was wether on the blockchain where you can basically store binary data, how it was used. Like real bitmap or PNG or JPG?
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  Nah, no one stores images on blockchain for real. Existing solution only store hash or alike data so those who actually store able to generate proof of store
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  Ahhh got it thanks