Tech startups are too expensive and I'm taking a step back, says man with same name as man who claimed there was no tech bubble

Marc Andreessen tells the Wall Street Journal he has "taken a step back" from investing in tech startups because some deals are "definitely on the expensive side." Turns out Andreessen hasn't made any big investments since July. Which is weird because last July someone using the same name as Marc Andreessen told the New York Times that there was no bubble and that in fact tech stocks were dead cheap. And shortly before that the same person appeared at the AllThingsD conference and explained that there was no tech bubble because everybody was saying there was a bubble and if everyone was saying that there's a tech bubble then by definition there wasn't any bubble because there can only be a bubble if nobody is saying there's a bubble.

No doubt the crap performance of companies like Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn and Pandora in the public market is making VCs gun shy. The worst example is Zynga, whose late-stage investors Kleiner, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price got burned when Zynga had to price its IPO below the price that those late-stage guys had paid in a private round last February.

No doubt we'll see other deals where the public markets refuse to pay as much as loony private investors did. But how did we get here? How did valuations get so out of line? Could it be because a few devil-may-care VCs spent the past few years throwing money around like drunken sailors in a whorehouse and assuring everyone that this was all perfectly sane and reasonable behavior and there was no tech bubble? Nah, couldn't be that.

[Update: A reader points out that LinkedIn doesn't belong on the list of "crap performers" since it was initially priced at $45 and is still trading above $60. Whether that's a disappointment depends somewhat on your point of view, since LinkedIn hit $90 on its first day of trading.]