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ZIRP looked crazy, but it accelerated the future. Money flowed, talent moved, and experiments ran at full speed.

What’s scary is we’re slowly seeing the same patterns again in AI. Overhyped valuations, zero revenue, massive headcounts, “disruption” narrative… rinse and repeat. History doesn’t just rhyme. In tech, it copies the pitch deck.

Hopin felt like vaporware that got lucky during the COVID surge. Valued at $8B before they even had a stable product. Post-pandemic? No moat. Just another Zoom wrapper. This was less about founders and more about VCs being high on growth charts. What a sham.

ZIRP wasn't the only factor at play here. These valuations were the result of a perfect storm: pandemic-accelerated digital adoption, massive liquidity injections, and FOMO-driven investing. Clubhouse getting a $4B valuation despite having no revenue model was absurd even by Silicon Valley standards, but VCs were terrified of missing the "next Twitter." What's fascinating is how quickly the market corrected once rates started rising. It wasn't just that money became more expensive, investors suddenly remembered that fundamentals matter. The Clubhouse collapse was inevitable the moment people could socialize in person again, regardless of interest rates.