What were you doing during the first dot boom? | Hacker News Reader

What were you doing during the first dot boom?

28 pointsdavidw76 comments

Just curious what other people were doing pre-2001, besides founding Viaweb.

I was all in up in it. Working for a company that eventually got acquired by Lucent. Through the rise and fall of the stock market at the time I was selling my options and investing the money in other things while most of my friends/coworkers were tracking their paper worth.

In the end, I pulled 7 figures from my options while most people I knew just sat there and let the world happen to them and were left with nothing the day Lucent dropped from about $70 to $50 then kept falling.

The morale: don't be greedy and don't be afraid to exercise some of your stock and diversify should you find yourself in a scenario where your options become worth something.

I also started a company of my own through those years and had a couple of other side interests going on. All in all it was a fun time. I recall spotting some trends, like Fore Systems oscillating between $8 and $10 a share for a while. I would buy 1 or 2 thousand shares on margin, then sell a few days later and cash the check. The stock market at the time was like a giant ATM if you knew how to play it and didn't get too greedy (there's that theme again).

"The stock market at the time was like a giant ATM if you knew how to play it and didn't get too greedy"

Lol. I upvoted before I saw that. You think that because you got lucky. Read Fooled by Randomness.

My wife and I both have better than average financial backgrounds. She has a couple of finance-related degrees, and has worked as a financial analyst for many years (since a bit before the dot com times). I also have working knowledge of financial operations. So while there was some luck involved, it was certainly not "fooled by randomness".

Read the book. Most financial professionals (and 100% of people who believe timing the market was ever possible) are simply fooled by randomness.

I never believed that "timing the market" was possible so much as I believed that you can leverage other peoples hype to your advantage. BTW, I also made a couple of bucks in the hyped real estate fiasco, and then bought a condo on Lake Winnipesaukee, and then stopped. The difference is that most people over leverage themselves and keep going for "one more fix". Again, rather than being greedy in highly unstable markets I chose instead to get in and get out, in theory I'm leaving money on the table, in reality I'm just taking advantage of things to my benefit and leaving my "real" investments to a more sane and logical strategy.

All you did was reduce your sample size. That doesn't mean you're any more profitable than anyone else in terms of EV. For instance, if the market crashed during the short period in which you were exposed to it, rather than a little later, you would be hugely negative.

Again, read the book. Really, it's eye-opening.

Like Taleb says, you can pick pennies in front of a steamroller and hope you don't get bowled over.

I was a computer science college student. I thought that the web was a great way to share information, but that "web applications" were boring compared to "real computer science" like programming language design and natural language processing.

In some ways, I regret focusing so much on traditional computer science and ignoring the web -- I probably could have made significantly more money circa 2000 than I did. But on the other hand, I just read an interview with Don Knuth in this month's Communications of the ACM, in which Don encouraged readers to do the work that they personally find interesting, not what they think others think to be interesting.

I've done some web work since 2000, and that can be fun, but when it gets down to it, my joy in computing really is found more in language processing than in web applications. Finding an income-optimizing way to merge the two would be most grand, I suppose. :-)

I remember having the same opinion. At one point I refused to learn HTML because I didn't consider it a real language.

I was finishing my undergraduate degree (end of 2000), computing the quadrillionth bit of Pi (it's a zero), and laughing when I was cold-called by VCs who read about me in the new york times and had heard that "distributed computing" was the latest hot thing.

I'm probably not unique in this respect, but I'm sure there aren't many people who write to VCs saying "thanks for the offer, but I find doing a D.Phil. at Oxford University to be far more interesting than getting $5M of funding for my work".

Did you win the Putnam?

If not, please don't brag about turning down VCs so you could attend Oxford.

Did you win the Putnam?

I think you know the answer to that question. :-)

EDIT: For the benefit of people who weren't around 387 days ago, staunch is (I presume) referring to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Wow. I'm wondering if you could take a few more opportunities to mention that you went to Oxford. At 13. And that you're smarter than everyone else.

If I were you, I'd seriously never link to that thread again. No matter how blindingly smart you are, you're going to need partners, employees, etc. No reason to permanently and publicly document your arrogance-- that kind of stuff (justifiably) scares people off.

You should honestly be humble-- most of the talent and knowledge you've accumulated probably doesn't have much application in the world of entrepreneurship. There's a reason you don't see Mensa members rocking the world of startups.

Wow. I'm wondering if you could take a few more opportunities to mention that you went to Oxford. At 13.

I didn't go to Oxford when I was 13, I went to Oxford when I was 19 -- my first degree (which I started when I was 13) was at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

But to respond to your main point: I don't go out of my way to mention this, but if it's relevant -- well, I'm not going to sweep it under the rug either. If someone asks what I was doing in 2000, I'll tell them; and in the context of the (first) dot-com bubble and in a forum where VCs are discussed frequently, I don't think there's anything inappropriate about snickering at an idiotic VC who cold-called an undergraduate with no business experience solely on the basis of media reports saying that said undergraduate had done something in the "hot" area du jour.

I'd seriously never link to that thread again.

I only added the link to that thread because without that context anyone who arrived at news.yc in the past year would have no way to understand the joke.

Even if it's relevant, give it some serious thought. There are very few audiences that are going to respond well to the "I am more competent than 90% of you", as evidenced by responses that it generated (one of them being one of the highest ranked single comments in the history of HN).

Sorry for being pissy-- there is a constant barrage of people on HN who say the equivalent of "Yes, startups are hard for normal people. But I'm really smart-- it may still be hard, but my chances are waaaaaay better".

That's such a destructive attitude (more for you than for the people who read it and walk away shaking their head).

This guy's never said he's smarter than everybody else, even though it's obviously true. The fact that he went to college early on comes up once in a while because a lot of posts on HN have to do with education and brains, but I have yet to see a post where he rubs it in anyone's face.

But there's a fundamental problem with anyone who admits to having gone to college at 13. It's a lot like being 6'9" at age 13. In that particular field, you're better than everyone else, and it's plain as day. However, unlike being really tall, people generally hate you for it. Smart guys don't get groupies. Smart guys aren't generally popular. There's stigma regarding intelligence, and I'm not sure why.

With regard to Mensa, keep in mind there are only 50,000 members in US, out of a maximum of 6 million that fall into the 98th percentile for IQ. If you tested Silicon Valley denizen, you'd find a lot of people on the right end of the curve. Woz, Sergey, Bill G, they're probably all in the top 99th percentile. In fact, Bill Gates won a national math competition when he was young.

If you mean Mensa people don't rock the valley, you're right, but if you mean 98th percentile folks don't rock the valley, I'm pretty skeptical.

In any case, Colin's obviously a genius. I for one don't hold it against him. I don't really into buy social standards of arrogance and humility; I don't want to overestimate or underestimate myself. I want to be accurate. If I'm the best, I won't try to convince myself otherwise. Likewise if I'm the worst. Colin, if you ever find you need someone to work with but your smarts have scared people off, contact me.

"This guy's never said he's smarter than everybody else, even though it's obviously true. The fact that he went to college early on comes up once in a while because a lot of posts on HN have to do with education and brains, but I have yet to see a post where he rubs it in anyone's face."

Ah, I'd hit "parent" a few times on his link. Up the tree he says:

"I'm a heck of a lot more competent than 90% of startup founders. Or even 90% of YC-funded-startup founders for that matter -- and YC-funded startups have distinctly less than a 90% failure rate."

Link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35068

I spoke too soon; I hadn't seen that. However, I'd like to point out I have no idea whether that's true. I only now it doesn't seem very amicable (at least to me), so in that regard, you're right.

Edit: I only know

I think the reference to the old link was made to complete the joke for newcomers, not to tout credentials. That was a very old thread.

don't hate modulate

Augh. That thread is a trainwreck in so many different dimensions.

Reading old threads like that (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015) is actually very interesting as there is so much great insight in them, especially for newcomers. It is even better given we now have hindsight to aid us.

Even the YC flame-wars and trainwrecks are on another level compared to the rest of the internet in general.

"... I was finishing my undergraduate degree (end of 2000), computing the quadrillionth bit of Pi (it's a zero) ..."

Going after the Chudnovsky brothers hey ~ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1992/03/02/1992_03_02_036_T... In the New Yorker article, "The Mountains of Pi", David Chudnovsky reckoned he needed a trillion to see if there was some sort of rule Pi. Did you see any patterns at this point? Is the average digit in Pi 4.5, slightly under?

I was going to 8th grade.

As was I. Y'know, I didn't even realize there was a bubble until after it had burst.

I spent my time teaching myself HTML and toying around with Photoshop 6. I also did an insignificant amount of PHP around 2001 -- mostly tweaking existing scripts to try and get them to do what I wanted (I used to get grounded for spending too much time on the computer and slacking at school; now I get paid a nice salary for "playing on the computer" :).

It was another year or two until I really started programming.

Didn't realize that there was a bubble either.

Going into 3rd grade or so, didn't really start programming either, unfortunately. I think I was just messing around with a copy of Visual Basic 6 I received from a book.

Another nod for someone who had no idea what was going on in in the tech world. I was in 6th grade, honing my skills in TI-BASIC.

Reminds me of coming across a guy who mentioned that he was in kindergarten when Kurt Cobain killed himself...

Jesus Christ, it was forteen years ago, and seems like yesterday. I'm getting old...

I was in high school, basking in the myth that we programmers would simply pick from among our countless job offers, deigning to work at the cushiest one, spending all day playing foosball, nerf darts, Quake, spinning around in our Aeron chairs, drinking free soda, and watching our stock options make us millionaires while we occasionally sauntered over to the keyboard to peck out a few (godlike) lines of Perl.

I graduated high school in 2000, and it was a rude awakening.

Middle school. Followed stocks obsessively. I started buying utilities in 1997, hoping there would be a panic and overreaction to Y2K. I remember telling someone to sell Cisco in 7th grade (Spring 2000), but other than that my market timing sucked.

Gambling, working, partying, and going to school, in that order. I then quit them all in reverse order.

Going to 9th grade. Didn't know of Paypal, Excite, or even eBay. Yahoo is the only pre-bubble company I know. Hotmail was not a startup to me, it was a product of Microsoft.

I was working at at a large research institute in Menlo Park (which is located a stones' throw from Google's first office). My first paycheck there has almost the same date as the first ($0) Google paycheck that Paul Buchheit posted to his blog.

(Sigh.)

I worked for Corvis and watched my paper millions disappear.

I was in high school, in a comp-sci course taught by a very good teacher. We used C++. I tried very hard to write a chess AI that learned by analyzing its previous games - I failed miserably, it was fun.

The same teacher taught the "CCNA" class, which was also taught well. I've pointed it out to him before, but Mr. Nesler, if you're reading this, you're probably the best teacher I ever had.

I remember discovering slashdot, and getting my "check what the URL looks like before clicking on it" reflexes. I also remember the "online journal" thing really starting to get popular.

I remember being fascinated by Java.

started a dot-com of course...

unfortunately it crashed and burned - but at least i tried.

Hiding out at relatively safe Disney.com after escaping Excite@Home just before the fall.

In 2001 I was in bootcamp. Prior to that I was working for a small music store chain writing an E-Commerce package. Spent my high school years (pre-2000) as a system administrator at a local ISP. In 2005 I gave a presentation to a high school "e-commerce business" class. It was a lot of fun reflecting on the field when it was so new that even a high school student could be on an even playing field.

Dropped out of high school to work for a dot-bomb, best decision i've ever made =) Make more money and didn't have to waste all that time in school.

Building an online exchange for technical personnel (plumbers, technicians etc.) with a designer who nested tables so deep that when I turned on auto-indent all lines went blank. I bet the poor guy we made it for never earned a penny from it. It's a good thing I was still cheap back then.

I started undergrad in Fall '99. Summer of 2000 and Winter of 2000-2001, I had a summer job at a startup in Reston, VA (think mymp3.com). Great experience, both technically and professionally. Unlike most startups, this was mostly old guys: people from my parents generation. They were wicked smart, experienced, and they worked a desk away from me.

The company eventually went under, which I saw coming. My first project was creating a daily reports system, so I was intimately familiar with site usage statistics, and they were not good.

The Summer of 2001, I called my old boss and asked if I had a job. "I don't have a job," he said. So it goes.

I joined a market-leading publicly traded company in Sept/99 just in time to see the existing employees become wealthy at the peak of the bubble while my options which vested after the bubble gave very modest returns.

Luck and timing... luck and timing...

Cheers

I started working as a developer working on the web in 1995, and somehow managed to avoid the bags full of cash and sports cars that were falling from the sky.

I did my first internet startup in 1997, a "secure remote data storage solution" which bombed due to partnering issues unfortunately.

I did get to spend lots of time consulting on companies doing things that were varying degrees of ridiculous, which was a great learning experience.

To this day I get a kick out of the people who told me the internet was a toy that wouldn't ever amount to anything. (This was in 93-95 when I was still learning and convinced that I wanted to do web work).

Most of the comments here are coulda/shoulda/woulda/if-only. We all make mistakes and fail, but it is the learning from them that is important. Failure is good. You are not making progress until you are failing.

High school. Making web pages for local businesses and fixing computers for neighbors. In hindsight, I wish I had met other programmers and learned programming instead of how to write HTML and use Photoshop.

I was surrounded by blue collar people, and politicians, lawyers, and businessmen growing up(and their families), and can't think of one engineering type or programmer I met before college.

Not that I regret one thing about my life, it's been plenty of fun, it just seems that starting a successful net company would have been easier had I gotten into it earlier.

ArsDigita.

I think I've finally recovered. :)

I worked at CKS Partners, in Portland, Oregon and then at Linuxcare in San Francisco and subsequently the office in Padova, Italy, where I landed when things fell apart.

I was in junior high at the epicenter of the dot-com boom. I came home every day to watch CNBC report on the newest IPO. I remember watching VAlinux debuting and it reaching several hundreds of dollar on opening day. As a b-roll they interviewed the CEO and watched him drop his credit card bills into the mail box. He's finally able to pay off his bills now that he's worth millions on paper.

Oh how I wish I was just a bit older back then..

I was battling with my finance professors about whether AMZ was going to fail or be huge.

I was short AMZ and long B&N in my 19 year old wisdom ;-)

Junior in high school, working as a UNIX Systems Administrator - got hired (at 17) by a .com company. Ended up learning Perl and MySQL out of it. Very fortunate that the boom ended and I lost my job (and ended up going to college), as staying as a Systems Administrator wasn't where my heart lay.

Writing games with graphics in QuickBasic 6.5, and learning Visual Basic 4 at the start of high school. Acing AP Computer Science twice in my last two years, since I wanted to learn both curriculums: C++ in Codewarrior in 11th grade, and Java in Notepad in 12th. (Java 1.1 or 1.2, it was.)

At the 'height of the boom', I was working on an internet startup...in Indiana...and the startup was, uh, concrete-related.

Needless to say, I served as a punchline for all of my friends that had moved to the Valley to make their fortunes.

Until they needed to borrow money because their options were underwater.

Boring FTW!

I was in 10th grade and was already part of the craze. I remember, even in India, it was a euphoria-like atmosphere. Companies offering T-shirts for clicking ads, internet connection for free. Heck, even domain names for free.

Those were the days... :)

I was skateboarding and video editing.

Messing about with HTML whenever I was hurt from skateboarding.

I made my first web app; a library card system for my church that ran on AppleScript and FileMaker. The search was just a loop that compared the word the user searched for with each record. Needless to say, it did not scale.

I was playing hockey in the streets with my friends. Basically, I was still in school (not college) and I was young. Sometimes at night, I would write a little bit of HTML and Javascript when no one was looking though ;)

I was in high school, writing Windows freeware and selling it to Winzip.

Founded an internet software company in SF that went down when the bubble burst. Was a great experience and several of the team are back together again, this time doing much better.

I was in the 6th grade making websites in HTML on angelfire and geocities for all of my friends. I was also using napster all the time and playing online yahoo chess obsessively.

i was working at be in 2001, the makers of beos. i knew they were in a bit of hot water, because beos wasn't selling at all, and they'd switched to working on embedded devices. but the company had been in business for over 10 years at that point, so i figured they'd keep finding a way.

alas, be went out of business seven months after i started working there. largely due to the dot-com bust. investors were getting very conservative. also due to microsoft's oem agreements.

2000 was my last year in high school. Major regret is spending the next 4 years in university instead of building my empire.

We started an FEC multicast streaming media company in '98 (got funded in '99) which flamed out with the CDN market in 2001.

Designing rave flyers, DJing, and producing a public access show called VJTV.

I wanted a different life experience and refused to go dot-com.

I was in High School, trying to figure out whether I wanted to major in Computer Science or Bassoon Performance.

I was in middle school, enjoying living in the valley. Then it started to crash and we moved away ;)

Finished my CS undergrad in 2001.

I think the boom was a great lesson for techies to remember the business model :-)

playing starcraft and diablo 2. The only web site that i visited was pokemon.com and google.

I was in the tenth grade and breaking all my personal weight records by gaining 5kg/month.

I was looking at the crazy money being poured and hitting my head against the keyboard

Working my ass off at CKS/USWebCKS/marchFIRST

I wrote software, sold it and made money.

I was in Middle School

Teaching high school.

in college, getting a co-op job at a software company

12th grade, reading Business 2.0 with windowside envy, wishing I was doing something cool, like starting a game company.

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