Kristina Hooper
"I've taken a lot of comfort from what's happening in the IPO market just because this feels very different than the IPO market of the late 1990s," she told Business Insider in an exclusive interview. While investors are upbeat about the potential of new technologies, she says they're not assuming all of the companies working with those technologies are bound for success. That unbridled enthusiasm is what made the tech bubble so dangerous, in her view.
It's unquestionably true that investors in the private market were willing to assign far greater valuations to these companies than the public has been. But Hooper says this doesn't reflect "irrational exuberance" that leads to bubbles as much as it reflects the amount of money that private equity investors have to spend.