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Marc Andreessen Doesn’t Think We’re in a Tech Bubble

By
Kia Kokalitcheva
Kia Kokalitcheva
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By
Kia Kokalitcheva
Kia Kokalitcheva
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November 3, 2015, 3:23 PM ET
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With unprecedented amounts of money being invested in startups and skyrocketing valuations, the biggest question in Silicon Valley continues to be whether or not we’re in a bubble.

But famed investor Marc Andreessen isn’t worried. In fact, the believes we’re currently in a bust, not a bubble, he said on stage at Fortune‘s Global Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday. Startups—at least the winners among them—should be valued much higher, he insisted.

In the last couple of years, startups have been raising money without any problems, sometimes at exorbitant valuations. New “unicorns”—startups with a value of at least $1 billion—are minted every few weeks, leading many observers to worry about whether we’re in the middle of a new tech bubble.

Some investors, like Benchmark partner Bill Gurley, have warned that some of these unicorns will fail in a not-so-distant future. Others have also warned that ballooning unicorn values will prevent them from getting acquired and that they face far more skeptical investors if and when they go public.

But again, Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, isn’t concerned, and believes that many companies are undervalued. To be sure, it’s not exactly a news flash that an investor thinks his investments are great and worth far more than others.

The difference with Andreessen is his extreme optimism. But he conceded that some startups are, in fact, valued too highly.

“As a basket, it’s certainly too low” in value, he said when asked about these unicorn companies as a whole. Andreessen also pointed out that the combined value of all unicorn startups is still less than that of Microsoft (MSFT), which has a market cap of $433.6 billion.

Andreessen isn’t alone in his opinion. Sam Altman, president of the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator, expressed a similar view in a blog post earlier this week.

Subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.

For more on unicorns and whether they’re at risk, watch this Fortune video:

 

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By Kia Kokalitcheva
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