Recently, in Las Vegas, a world boxing event occurred with Pacquiao and Mayweather. As put by Jon Swartz, USA Today correspondent, “the pummeling…continues”.  Mr. Swartz is referring to the social media companies who shown less than exciting sales in the first quarter of 2015. Twitter, LinkedIn and Yelp are among those who have posted underwhelming figures.

The event, the Collision Conference, hosted many startups, venture capitalists, and investors in social media. It was contrasted with the Davos Summit as a “Davos for Geeks” by one journalist.  The Web Summit is in its fourth year and the Collision, the US sister organization, is holding its second event this week.

The majority of the tech pummeling is about whether another tech bubble is about to “burst”. Says Hemant Taneja, managing director at General Catalyst Partners, a venture capitalist firm, “It is a topic of discussion everywhere…[a]t dinner parties in Silicon Valley, the question invariably is, ‘Is this 1996 or 1999?'”.

Bryan Stolle, says of the bubble, “We may have an uneven bubble, like bubbles settling in a bottle of Champagne.” Stolle is a general partner of the VC firm firm Mohr Davidow Ventures. He goes on to say that tech stocks are still alluring even though investors appear jittery. Tech stocks are attractive because they are a growth market, Stolle said, “You can’t make any money on ‘safe’ investments,” he says. “There is a lot of money chasing growth. Tech stocks offer that.”

As the most popular sport of boxing in this country has taken on a lackluster appearance, tech is showing signs of its shine wearing off for different reasons. The majority of investors are showing some deep rooted concerns that the sell-offs and low quarterly results do not justify their high valuations nor the ability to grow fast enough to justify those valuations of stock price.

Amongst the greatest concerns is the possibility of a trickle down effect on private companies, like Pinterest and Dropbox which are highly valued in the tech sector of the market. These companies would end up having a difficult time raising private capital in the event of a market melt-down.

“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.”

There have been many tech related shows in the calendar in various cities such as San Franscisco, Santa Clara, Rancho Palos Verde in California as well as in New York. Most of the shows are large and have panels instead of speakers. The vice president of advertising product management at Pandora, Jack Krawczyk said “This is a smaller show, with short presentations (usually 15 minutes) that are focused and to the point”. He will be speaking on brand management at the event.

According to some VC’s, the tech allure and its possible impact on vertical industries (like small business) is the draw for investors who may be willing to take the risk for more gain.

Taneja said of the market, “Who would have thought of a $40 billion market cap for a taxi-like service (with Uber)?…”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.”

Stolle added, “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.” He was the former CEO  of Agile Software which was acquired by Oracle in 2007 for $500 million.