Arthur Patterson, cofounder of Accel Partners, postulated that the tech industry follows approximately 14 year cycles - 8 years of growth and 6 years of "retrenchment". Apparently, this pattern has held up since the 1960s. Most likely the current cycle began in 2000/2001 (6 retrenchment years) and will last until 2014. The best time for VC returns are supposedly at the end of the cycle (the next 3 years).

We all stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us and some are giants.  Arthur C. Patterson is without a doubt a giant and a legend.  His theory on the 14 year cycle turns out not only to be accurate over the last 40 years but may point to the work of another giant, Edward R. Dewey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edw...), not the Dewey decimal system guy. I will use some of the data I have produced years ago at FSC website (url below).

This is a long winded confirmation of Arthur Patterson's Cycle predictions using a universal theory of identifiable and repeatable Cycles.

Brian Roemmele, Alchemist & Metaphysician

Edward concluded a most confounding yet simple conclusion:

Everything has a knowable and repeatable cycle.  And sometimes multiple cycles come together to cause especially large dips or peaks.  The impact of a Cycle or group of Cycles can be quantified and objectively analyzed. 

Edward traced the varying cycles in stock market prices, the economy, wildlife abundance, prices of wheat, corn and cotton, precipitation, wars, tree rings and fashion designs, and many, many more apparently completely unrelated Cycles. He discovered that Cycles were found with periods ranging from a few months to hundreds of years.  The work spanned several thousand cycles by the mid 1930s.

Understand, prior to Edward's work, thousands of experts had developed individualized hypothesis for each field of study and they tried to conclude that they could identify underlying fundamentals.  In each industry they broke appart cause and effect, supply and demand but very few were able to fully support a true and verifiable and repeatable basis for a supported theory.