I was surprised but not completely flabbergasted by the phone call I received a few weeks ago. A representative of Arista Networks, a networking company I've written about recently, phoned to inform me that the company's chief executive wanted to offer me "friends and family" shares in Arista's upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit, down to the number of shares I'd have the opportunity to purchase at the IPO price. The caller specifically wanted me to understand this offer came directly from CEO Jayshree Ullal.

    I declined. I briefly explained that it was impossible for me to accept the gift that was being offered. I also told the (clearly uncomfortable) Arista rep, with whom I've dealt for stories forFortune, that it is a horrible idea to be making these shares available to me. That's because the company must be similarly propositioning other business partners who, like me, are neither a friend of the company nor family members of its employees.

    I never heard another word from the company, which hasn't yet gone public. (I phoned Wednesday to ask if other journalists had been offered IPO shares; a spokeswoman pointed me to a section of its Form S-1 filing which states that a directed share program exists -- and nothing more.) But as I hung up the phone, I realized that I finally had tangible confirmation that we are squarely in the middle of a tech-company bubble.

    At the outset of this post, I wrote that I was merely surprised by this slimy suggestion that it'd be okay for a journalist to buy into the IPO of a company he has covered. That's because, as with so many of the telltale signs of a bubble, I have seen this before. During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and early aughts, a colleague of mine at the San Jose Mercury News got into hot water for accepting a "friends and family" share allocation. (She contended that the CEO who offered her the shares was indeed a friend. I had and have no reason to doubt her assertion, which was and is beside the point.) When times are so good that executives are willing to disregard the difference between ethical and unctuous behavior, it's just one sign that the end, relatively speaking, is near.

    It's not the only sign. Calling a bubble is something of a fool's errand. Some will rely on comparative valuation analysis to argue that private and public prices for companies are overvalued. That's fine though imprecise, and almost no help in terms of timing. Others will point to scarcity of real estate, salaries paid for engineers, or the inability to nail down a reservation at a hot San Francisco restaurant. All are good tells of a tech bubble.

    Mine, however, revolve around my personal experiences of having lived through the last one. The oversupply of journalism jobs covering the technology industry, for example, is a good indicator. Silicon Valley is the hottest story going these days, and not just because The New Yorker, New York magazine, and the New York Times Magazine have discovered it. New digital publications devoted exclusively to covering technology have sprung up, including PandoDaily, The Information, Re/code, and Mashable. That, in turn, has provoked a frenzy of tech-coverage hiring at the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. All of these reporters are now competing for what a wise editor at one of these publications calls "micro scoops," stories that are fresh, exclusive, newsy -- and most likely irrelevant to all but a group of people you could count on your hands and feet.

    几个星期前，我接到了一个让我有些吃惊的电话，但是也没有吃惊到目瞪口呆的程度。我不久之前曾经写过一篇关于Arista网络公司的报道，正是这家公司的一个代表打电话给我，说他们的CEO想在公司即将举行的IPO中为我提供一点“友情股”。对方抛出的“绣球”详细到明确提出了我有机会以IPO价格购买的股份的份数。而且他特别表示，希望我明白这份好意是CEO贾什瑞•乌拉尔本人的意思。

    我拒绝了。我简单地解释说，我是不可能接受这份好意。给我打电话的这位代表就是当初与我接洽采访事宜的那一位，我能听出来他明显有点不太自在。我还告诉他，把购买这些股票的机会提供给我绝对是个坏主意。因为这家公司肯定也向其他既非公司的朋友、也非员工家属的人（比如我）抛出了类似的橄榄枝。

    这家公司现在还没有上市，我也没有从他们那里听到其它任何消息。（我5月7日给这家公司打了电话，问是否他们也为其他记者提供了IPO股份。这家公司的一位女发言人让我看了一份IPO筹资文件，上面写着存在一个定向的股权计划——此外再没什么特别的地方。）但是我挂断电话后，我意识到，现在我已经完全可以确定，我们正处在一场科技泡沫里。

    正如本文开头所写的那样，当我报道过的一家公司向我抛出购股的橄榄枝时，我并没有感到特别奇怪，那是因为我并不是第一次碰到这种事，而它正是发生科技泡沫的众多迹象之一。20世纪90年代末和21世纪初的“.com泡沫”时期，我一个供职于《圣荷塞信使报》（the San Jose Mercury News）的朋友就是由于买了“友情股”而被套牢了。（她说那位卖给她股票的CEO的确是她的一个朋友，我没有理由反驳她的这句话，不过这和重点无关。）如果市场真的“牛”到了连企业高管都愿意“跨过道德的边境”的地步，那么，它无非是表明，末日相对来说已经不远了。

    但它并不是唯一的迹象。断言泡沫是吃力不讨好的行为。有些人可能根据比较估值分析，提出私人和上市企业的价值被高估了。这种方法还好，只是不太精确，而且对确定时间没有帮助。也有人指出房地产的紧俏、付给工程师的工资上涨，或者在旧金山的热门餐馆里想订个位子都很难等等。但这些其实都是能够佐证科技泡沫的迹象。

    我用来确定科技泡沫的方法主要围绕着我的个人经验——我曾经经历了上一次科技泡沫。比如一个很好的指标就是，现在负责报道科技行业的记者职位太多了。硅谷一直是这些日子最热门的话题，不仅仅是因为《纽约客》（ The New Yorker）、《纽约》杂志（New York ）、《纽约时报》（the New York Times）等知名媒体在搞科技新闻，近年还涌现出一批专门报导科技行业的数字媒体，比如PandoDaily、The Information、Re/code和Mashable等等。这种现象反过来又促使《华尔街日报》（the Wall Street Journal ）和《彭博新闻》（Bloomberg News）等都出现了招聘科技记者的热潮。这些记者们纷纷忙着抢所谓的“微独家”，也就是新鲜、独家、具有话题性的报道。但是，这些新闻大部分除了跟少数人有关，与我们大多数人的生活几乎没什么关系。

    At the risk of sounding old, I've seen this before, too. Back in the good old days, there wereUpside and Red Herring magazines (each notable, like some of today's new outlets, for being backed by some of the venture capitalists they covered), as well as CNET News, The Industry Standard and robust coverage in the Journal, Times, and -- bless its diminished soul -- theMercury News.

    The fact that most people reading this post won't have ever heard of some of these publications should sufficiently explain how it all turned out for them. And some of the news organizations that I listed above that are in existence today won't survive the demise of the current bubble. Some will, of course. That's how bubbles work.

    I can also gauge the tech bubble by the flow of dinner, drinks, and other social invitations in my inbox. The PTA at my daughter's school is hosting a really neat fundraiser this week in San Francisco, the kind of event that appeals to an audience far beyond our school community. I personally know of no fewer than four other significant functions happening that night elsewhere in San Francisco, and that's not counting straight-ahead business functions. I could easily dine out four nights a week on the dime of some public relations firm that is hosting a dinner in an attempt to drum up publicity for its client. And I'm not invited to nearly the number of swanky gatherings that my younger, more receptive colleagues are.

    This isn't new, either. During the last bubble -- when I was younger and had fewer responsibilities outside of work -- I pretty much stopped going to tech-related dinners because they were all the same. The stories were the same. The people were the same. The restaurants? The same.

    After the bubble popped, the invitations slowed down dramatically. It was a relief.

    I'll conclude with one caveat and one lesson learned.

    The caveat is that I have no idea when this game of musical chairs will end and who will be left standing. I just know that it will end.

    The lesson involves how I intend to behave differently this time around. Before, I was so exhausted from the trajectory of it all -- first the giddy run-up, then the monotonous exuberance, and finally the depressing collapse -- that I had a hard time getting excited about the technology business for a while. For a short period of time, it blinded me to legitimately cool companies that were still grinding away on interesting businesses. I remember visiting Google (GOOG), for example, during the depths of the tech downturn and being simultaneously excited by its optimism and unimpressed with its business model. (Oops.)

    This time around, I plan to keep my eyes open for the interesting companies and entrepreneurs that are sure to survive this strange period. Because the tech bubble is upon us -- and I fully expect it to burst.

    冒着让大家觉得我已经老了的风险，我要说的是，以前我也见过这种局面。以前的科技泡沫时期，也有一些叱咤一时的科技媒体，比如Upside和《红鲱鱼》杂志（Red Herring，像今天的一些新媒体一样，这两家媒体背后也都有知名风投的资助），以及CNET新闻、《行业标准》（The Industry Standard）等，另外《华尔街日报》和《泰晤士报》（Times）也大量出炉科技类报道，当然还有走下坡路的《圣荷塞信使报》。

    但是事实上，本文的大多数读者可能从来没听说过其中一部分媒体的名字，充分说明了他们的结局。另外，我在上文列出的部分媒体，可能也熬不过这一次的泡沫。当然，也有一些能继续活下去。泡沫就是这样的。

    另外，从我收件箱里的各种饭局、酒局和社交活动的邀请中也能看出泡沫的迹象。就在这个礼拜，我女儿学校的家长与老师联谊会将在旧金山举办一场高规格的资金筹集会，但它希望吸引的人远远不止是这个学校的家长圈子。光是我个人就听说当晚旧金山的其他地方将有不少于四场重大聚会，其中还不包括直奔主题的商业活动。我每个礼拜至少有四天晚上都能轻松吃上饭局，举办方都是想为客户做宣传的公关公司。更何况我受邀的次数还远远比不上我那些更年轻、更愿意接受邀请的同事们。

    这种情况也不新鲜了。上一次泡沫中——当时我还年轻，而且除了工作之外也没有那么多责任——我当时基本上都不再参加与科技行业有关的饭局了，因为它们都是一个样。主题是一个样，人是同一拨人，餐厅呢？也是同一家餐厅。

    科技泡沫破裂后，这类邀请大幅减少。真是让人送了口气。

    最后我要给大家一个警告，以及一个我们学到的教训。

    警告是：我不知道这场“抢椅子”的游戏什么时候结束，谁最后会抢不到椅子坐，我只知道它一定会结束。

    我要说的经验，则是我这次将以不同的方法应对这个泡沫。上次泡沫的过程中，那个泡沫从膨胀到破裂的过程让我身心疲惫——首先是令人头晕眼花地增长膨胀，然后是千篇一律地虚假繁荣，最后是令人失望地崩溃——我甚至很难再为科技行业的事而感到兴奋了。有一段时间里，我甚至无视了一些真正搞科技的比较“酷”的公司。比如我在科技行业陷入低谷的时候访问了谷歌，当时虽然谷歌的乐观精神让我感到兴奋，但它的业务模式却没给我留下什么印象。

    这一次，我打算睁大眼睛，仔细观察那些肯定能熬过这个奇怪的时期的有趣的公司和企业家们。因为科技泡沫就在我们身边——而且我完全相信它会破裂。（财富中文网）

    译者：朴成奎