Post GoogTube deal, I think it’s pretty obvious that “bubble” is on everyone’s minds, but hey, the more voices in the anti-chorus, the more likely a couple of these booster idiots might hop off the bandwagon leading things back to the crapper, right?

This New York Times article today, It’s Not the People You Know. It’s Where You Are, is about as stupid a piece of Bubble 1.0 journalism I’ve seen in a long while. Randall Stross, baby, I’m calling you out.

Stross strongly implies that you better move your ass to the Valley if you really want your startup to succeed. That’s exactly what happened last time around, and there’s a legion of Bay Area middle class (teachers, blue collar workers, etc.) that would like to talk to you, Mr. Stross, and they don’t look happy.

Interestingly, I seem to remember that what defined Web 2.0 in it’s infancy was how the ideas were coming from everywhere but the Valley. But I guess that story’s been done to death by now.

Stross, how many startups do you think actually get funded by VCs? How many of those funded companies actually make it to the big payout? The odds are slim, my friend, and despite this boundless optimism you discovered under every rock (only anecdotally, I might add — let’s see a law firm go on the record that, “yeah, we’ll happily defer $20K in fees for some equity), eventually your creditors do come calling. And that’s when everything starts falling apart.

[I say all that having lived through the first bubble and having to leave San Francisco in 2004 because of it. No, I’m not happy about it at all.]

Sure, the investor money is flooding back, but given the typical 1 out of 10 success rate (probably lower these days with competition), do you really expect to see lots of payouts given that Google, Yahoo and a handful of media conglomerates are the only buyers? Without IPO as a standard exit strategy, there’s just not enough liquidity events to go around.

Google and Yahoo are maturing businesses whose missions conflict on the most basic of levels: solve users’s problems faster, but slow things down enough to extract more revenue. Eventually, both companies are going to reach an equilibrium with this contradiction, and that will open the door to the next wave of services. If you think about the massive size and depth of the Internet today, Google is really not in an unassailable position. And in fact, their size in a world of niches is an undeniable, exploitable weakness.

That means that very soon, Google and Yahoo will turn inward as they spend more and more time keeping their own huge houses in order. Media conglomerates, as public companies led by Net-naive executives, are going to be in precarious positions for the next 10 years. There will be spurts of buying, but long droughts as well. Private equity firms are faddish buyers and the market’s going to have IPO drymouth for a long long time.

So where’s a bright-eyed, money-grubbing startups to go? It’s not like they have business models — AdSense is a joke, a way to stave off the inevitable, but eventually even the inevitable comes to pass.

Divide average funding amounts by average burn rate and you’ve probably got a good bead on when this house of cards is going to start crumbling down.

It’s probably safe to say that this bubble will be more contained (for the very reasons Stross lays out). Meaning that if you’re actually serious about your startup, you might want to incorporate “bubble risk” in your business model and avoid the Valley entirely. If your idea is good, the money will come. If not, well … get a better idea.

The viability of your company, and hell, your future, might depend on it.