TL;DR In the broader economy: "Almost every asset is overvalued,"
For those of you that followed the hashtag #2014GC last week you saw this:
"The quantitative easing and the excess money and the low interest rates have driven pricing up of almost all financial assets to beyond what their intrinsic value might be," Joshua Harris, co-founder and chief investment officer of $161 billion private equity firm Apollo Global Management, said Monday at the Milken Institute's Global Conference in Los Angeles.
"So even though we can all chat about the benevolent growth environment that exists in the U.S. and to a lesser extent globally, the ability to make money and invest wisely on that is very, very challenging right now because you're starting at a point in the valuation cycle that is very, very aggressive."
Harris added that it's a "time to be cautious" and that Apollo is still looking for investments in sectors that are still relatively depressed. "Almost every asset is overvalued," he said.
The fellowship, and Hackers program looks promising. However, it appears to leave out a position for the OP's brother. As he mentioned there are many people with deep insight into a problem, but lack the technical resources to execute their solution.
If you're looking for something to contribute to, TheOdinProject looks like a fun project. I saw them on HN a few weeks ago (March 25th). https://github.com/TheOdinProject
There's ~3 hospitals in the USA that have transparent pricing.
If you're interested in disrupting healthcare the founder of The Surgery Center of Oklahoma has a blog on pricing transparency. http://surgerycenterofoklahoma.tumblr.com/
Some additional resources:
Free Market Medical Association website. http://marketmedicine.org/members/ It lists all the resources and providers that provide transparent pricing.
The Pricing Healthcare Blog and Pricing Healthcare website is a crowd sourcing project where patients can input their medical bills and get the cash price of procedures in their area. (The CEO of Safeway started a company with Safeway's similar, proprietary, data, however they only sell the pricing data to companies with ~10,000+ employees).
The Self Pay Patient is a blog and resource for those that choose to self insure:
http://selfpaypatient.com/
The speed is what's impressive. One can build a structure in California for a similar price.
It seems people often over estimate the hard costs of construction in the first world. It's cheaper than people think.
In 2005, at the height of the building boom (labor was scarce) in Southern California, I built a 400 sq ft detached garage: Stucco, rolled composite roof, concrete slab, drywall, swiss coffee interior paint, garage door, and 30R insulation in the ceiling (well insulated).
Using all contracted labor.
Total cost: $5,500.
IOW, not much more than this 3D printed house. Building a house in 2.4 hours is the impressive part.
Instead of spending money on a dev boot camp maybe try going through The Odin Project, and beefing up your github. Then maybe join TreeHouse temporarily just to have them help you find a job.
It's disappointing when the rich complain about the poors. If you're rich stop complaining about ObamaCare and build a better a better product/service.
Billionaires, gather a few of your friends in a room & build a solution then:
1. One will build a hospital in your town, that accepts NO insurance, only cash.
2. One will build a bank that finances the patients of that hospital.
3. One will buy the loans from that bank and sell those loans to investors on Wall Street, so the bank can finance more patients at the hospital.
4. One will write a risk management API so loan interest rates can accurately be set for each patient.
5. One will use that API and start a crowd funding company, enabling "savers" to bipass the above bank and earn a return from loaning to "borrowers/patients" directly. That person will then put the bank(s) out of business.
6. ...
Yeah, the $3T the FED printed is accomplishing its purpose of keeping asset values inflated. That being said, remember when everybody said Facebook was overvalued, every time they had a funding round?
Well, they never really traded above ~17 times 12 months forward revenue (Not including secondary market trades or Microsoft's strategic investment).
2004: $100,000 line of credit from Dad when accounts were frozen.
2004: 10x. Seed. 1st ads in May generated ~$2,400 revenue. In June, Thiel invests at $5M valuation;
2005: 17x. A. $6M rev at a $100m valuation;
2006: 10x. B. $52M run rate on $525 pre money;
2007: 100x.C. $150M revenue at $15B valuation;
2009: 13x. D. $750M revenue at $10B valuation;
2010: 17x. E. $2b revenue at $35B valuation;
2011: 30x. F $3.3B run rate on a $100B valuation;
2012: 23x. IPO $4.2B revenue on $100B IPO valuation;
2012 17x Post IPO $4.2B revenue on $68B market cap at sale;
2012 6x Post IPO $7B (2013) Revenue on $40.7B market cap;
*Note: Not including Microsoft's strategic investment, and Secondary market trades
Fintech entrepreneurs: If you want to help solve the underfunded pension crisis in the world, and/or help increase the wealth of the bottom 95% work on building a product that allows non-accredited investors to crowd fund real estate, where the investors own 100% of the property and the sponsors earn a fee for managing it.
If the bottom 95% were allowed to crowd fund real estate wealth would very quickly be more evenly distributed.
Maybe we should also pay people to study math as well. [$10] for each Khan Academy lesson they pass. It'd cost ~$2,500 to educate one person on the entire math curriculum.
I think it's plausible, in the future, we will be paying people to learn.
ph0rque, your AutoMicroFarm side project looks interesting. It's a idea I think about often. Instead of an upfront purchase of the hydroponic system, a SaaS model might increase adoption. e.g. You charge $100 per month to manage the customers vegetable garden. Basically, it's a hack. The farmer just hacked a way to farm w/o having to own land, pay for water or utilities, and gets paid regardless if the crop fails. Farmer earns ~$100 per hour per customer, and can scale. Inspiration for idea: Our local non-tech gardeners.
Revenue Multiple would make a more useful chart to me. Broadcast.com had $60M in revenue when they sold. Knowing they sold at ~98x revenue seems more useful to me when pricing a stock.
Do you have a template of that model?