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All you need to know is right here on this DVD

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/

It's called Startup.com and shows the massive initial growth of Govworks web-site (300+ staff), but then things go South and their competitors catch them up and put them out of business. One of my favourite documentaries and gives good insight into the dot com bubble burst of 2000-2001.

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It's a great movie. Also really funny and surprising just how little time/mind share/effort they seemed to spend on the actual product and users of it. Of course that could have been in the editing.

That was the dotcom bubble for ya. Everybody was swinging for the bleachers and using VC money to pay the bills. It made some sense - you had something brand new and the first-mover advantage was a big advantage. So the important thing was to take your idea to product and worry about self-sufficiency after you had customers.

At some point you have to wean yourself off the VC money. Some of these companies were set up more to land investors than customers, and even though they understood, intellectually, in the long term the money had to come from the customer, it's not an easy shift.

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