This is just how I read it and I might be reading a lot of my own experience into things but I was a very young foot soldier the last time (still in my teens) and I think there's an important point here. The thing about the last bubble is most of the foot soldiers that I knew weren't working to cash out. They were working to change the world.

Don't get me wrong. Money was a nice consolation prize but still.

The problem today is most of the people I meet in startups seem to have the same goals. For all the talk I can't recall meeting a founder who openly admitted to building a company just to flip it. Yet they're repeating the mistakes of the late 90s because our industry has very little institutional memory

(perhaps all that looking forward makes us forget to look back)

I think his point here is that those of us who were there need to remember what happened and make a point of imparting those lessons to those who weren't there. Because they were too young to really see what was going on.