A high-tech Collision course in downtown Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS — The city has just recovered from the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao mega-fight over the weekend. But the pummeling in other quarters continues.

Social media companies have been taking a beating on Wall Street after several — Twitter, LinkedIn and Yelp — posted sales that underwhelmed the market.

The bloodletting was a major topic of conversation at the Collision Conference, a confluence of start-ups, venture capitalists and investors that one journalist calls "Davos for geeks." The show, in its second year here, started Tuesday.

The missteps are also sure to rekindle debate over whether a "bubble" is about to burst in the tech industry.

"It is a topic of discussion everywhere," says Hemant Taneja, managing director at General Catalyst Partners. "At dinner parties in Silicon Valley, the question invariably is, 'Is this 1996 or 1999?'"

"We may have an uneven bubble, like bubbles settling in a bottle of Champagne," says Bryan Stolle, a general partner at VC firm Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Despite concerns from jittery investors, tech remains alluring, Stolle says, because it is a growth market. "You can't make any money on 'safe' investments," he says. "There is a lot of money chasing growth. Tech stocks offer that."

Like the sweet science of boxing, a sport that once was the most popular in America before the public turned on its in-ring butchery, some tech companies are losing their luster — albeit for different reasons.

The desultory quarterly results, and sell-off, illustrate deep-rooted concerns investors have about the ability of social media companies to grow fast enough to justify their sky-high market valuations.

It has some investors wondering if the market meltdown for some tech companies will have a trickle-down effect on highly valued private companies such as Dropbox and Pinterest, which could have a hard time raising private capital.

"A lot of people have been talking about it for a long time," says Michael Africk, co-founder and CEO of Inmoji, a messaging service that contains clickable icons from Nike and others. "This show gives us a chance to rub elbows with a great group of venture capitalists and investors, and see where things stand."

Against a backdrop of battered stocks in a boxing town, Collision and a slew of other events offer an early litmus test on how investors and start-ups respond.

Tech-related shows clog the calendar. Last week, there was Microsoft's Build developer conference in San Francisco. This week, it's TechCrunch Disrupt NY in New York, Internet of Things DevCon in Santa Clara, Calif., VentureScape in San Francisco and more. Later this month, it's Google I/O in San Francisco and Code Conference is in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. (You get the idea.)

"This is a smaller show, with short presentations (usually 15 minutes) that are focused and to the point," says Jack Krawczyk, vice president of advertising product management at Pandora, who is speaking at Collision on brand advertising. "Panels usually go too long."

Yet the allure of tech and its potential impact on vertical industries is what draws investors, who are more than willing to take the risk, VCs say.

"Who would have thought of a $40 billion market cap for a taxi-like service (with Uber)?" Taneja says. "A lot of what is happening is investors — many of them private — are coming earlier and earlier, to take advantage of these types of opportunities. That is not going to change."

Adds Stolle, who was CEO of Agile Software, acquired by Oracle for about $500 million in 2007: "The big difference from 2000 (when the dot-com meltdown roiled the market) is there were a lot of companies then that weren't real companies, such as Webvan, Pets.com and eToys. Today, the Web is living up to its value, in some cases, with real companies like Facebook."