Great slide deck from BusinessInsider about why 2012 is not a startup bubble.

The fact that people keep saying it's a bubble is part of what keeps the market grounded.

And it turns out valuations are not sky-high relative to fundamentals.

Groupon, Zynga, Pandora, LinkedIn, and even Apple are trading at less than ten times 2012 revenues.

Total VC investments by quarter are relatively flat from 2001 through now.

The slide deck does note that tax rates go up January 1, so more companies are incentivized to sell themselves (or their stock!) by December 31.

Marc Andreessen agrees.

Shift happens.

“Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system,” Andreessen said. “They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn’t. Today, it’s probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say – shift happens.”

I love this:

Channeling venture capitalist John Doerr who one claimed the internet was under-hyped, Andreessen pointed to the smartphone as similarly under-hyped. “We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people,” Andreessen says. “Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it’s so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.”

How many average people will really need a desktop -- or even laptops -- going forward? Will your phone in a dock be the next default office computer?

Will we have a future out of Avengers (or Minority Report!) where information is available on whatever screen is in front of us? Sure.

Might it take another decade to get there? At least.

Feels like we're still years away from untethering our iPhones and iPads from the desktop.