I remember a conversation with the owner just before the bubble burst where he was expressing incredulity at all the US companies with high valuations and zero profits. It’ll all end in tears was the prediction.
The company I was working for had meteoric growth over those few years, selling an Enterprise product we built to insurance companies. I barely even knew there was bubble and that it was bursting.
My next job in 2001 was another small UK company, also selling Enterprise products for real money. No one ever talked about the state of ‘startups’ in the US.
It was a whole different world. On one side you had companies starting up, building products that fixed real problems, that they then sold to other companies for money — all without any outside funding.
On the other side you had ‘startups’ burning through other people’s money, building things nobody wanted, all going bust.
And they wondered why.
Now? Still working for companies that build products people want and then sell for money. And trying to build one of my own on the side.
The media coverage was big. Local newspapers, local TV. I was too young to know what I was doing, we only had 2 customers. Internet was booming news and offline channels covered whole pages about us. After the media attention we grew fast. We hired a rack at a datacenter and were refused many times at the door, because we looked like kids.
We earned quite some money for our age, build pc's and servers, went to LAN parties.
We hacked the webserver of a competitor company in a village nearby and replaced the photos of employees with edited variants with different ugly color shades. It took them weeks to notice. We used Telnet to find the version of the Exchange server, hacked into the email, found webserver credentials.
One time a company wanted a contract for the webdesign. We didnt have those. We took the contract from some competitor but forgot to change their business name. They signed without reading.
We communicated over IRC and landline phone. I had an internet connection over ISDN, my cofounder cable (CATV). Sometimes we used ICQ.
We had business cards with our logo and we would give them to everyone. On a bicycle we went through the villages to spread businesscards to farmers. Those cards had the sticker of a cow on it. 2 weekends spreading cards gave us about 10 clients. We created a simple website with pictures of the farm and equipment. They paid 750 for it and 150 per extra page. They shared the website with family and other farmers. Often this gave new clients.
After 2 years or so we got bored and gave everything away to a company we were friends with.
Now I own several software companies.