When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
dfarq.homeip.net
dfarq.homeip.net
Savvy investors piled in to the stock, reasoning that, while internet startups might come and go, the internet itself was surely here to stay. It was popular to observe that, in the California gold rush of the mid-1800s, the purveyors of mining equipment made it rich more reliably than the prospectors for gold.
Anyway the Cisco stock price peaked in March 2000, and to this day it still has not reached that level again. The savvy investors were of course correct in their belief that the internet would continue to be important, and that Cisco would continue to be an important manufacturer of internet networking equipment. But they lost money anyway, because once the euphoria had worn off the market consensus was that the stock just wasn’t worth as much as the price it had been selling for at the height of the mania.
Any parallels to hot contemporary stocks are left as an exercise for the reader — and I do not mean to suggest that history must always repeat exactly.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have custom ASIC and TPU projects in their pipeline, and what holds true today might not hold true in 5 years.
A major reason Nvidia was able to do so well was because of technical outreach by donating their GPUs to programs all over the US, building a strong albeit self serving OSS relationship, the CUDA ecosystem, and the acquisition of Infiniband.
Much of these advantages can be nullified by competitive margins and pricing for hyperscalers designed and owned hardware.
Cisco was hit by this same situation as server vendors like Dell began integrating their own in-house networking functionality within their servers, and Dell itself was outcompeted by cloud vendors.
By rights they should have been fast followers, but they stacked the critical mistakes so high that frankly I think NVIDIA's subsidized GPGPU classes are the smaller part of this story. If the people struggling to get OpenCL to work had been able to get it to work (on other than NVIDIA GPUs lol) the situation would look very different today.
Although I hear VCs are working on an algorithm where they burn money directly and the smoke patterns represent the solution to the multiplication. That might keep the margins high.
This has been bothering me for some time now. It’s rather obvious to me, as an engineer, which startups are well positioned and which aren’t… Do VCs really have no standard for due diligence, do they really just not care, or is there something else at play that I’m missing…?
As an exercise, imagine you have a portfolio which will in a typical year lose around 1.2% to the tax man for capital gains. Rather than accepting the guaranteed loss of taxes - you take ludicrous bets on asset classes where you can be guaranteed to book a loss which could be harvested for tax purposes, or will return 100x your investment (at which point you don't care about the tax man).
Viewed in this light, the VC preference for burn bright and burn fast startups makes sense. The worst case scenario for some LPs would be to still have money leftover.
(As a general rule of thumb, I'm deeply suspicious of any 'it's a tax write-off' explanation for people losing money: its extremely rare for losing money to make someone better off overall. It may be advantageous for them to move around where and when they say they are losing money, as you'll generally be more tax-efficient if you make money consistently and through activities in areas which are not as highly taxed, but it's not generally a useful strategy to light cash on fire to reduce your tax bill: you tend to be out of more money than you save on tax)
Depending on the stage, investors don't care about any of the details except for the founders ability to raise the next round and their probability to IPO at a later/advanced stage. The stock is the product and whether you are selling a real time machine or a crystal is irrelevant.
Which is not that "insane" really. If that's how money is being made, and investors are in the business of making money, then that's the path they are going to take.
This is the right answer, some people think that the dot-com bubble and mortgage bubble is something for investors to regret, when in fact they made such a ridiculous amount of money they're just searching for the next bubble. Not the next great product.
If that's your belief, then thinking it's risky and you may lose your shirt requires believing that you may not be smart. Which is a tough thing to accept for a lot of people, especially ones who think investment success is all about smarts and not luck.
We all know there is no 'sure thing' when investing, but if you're a large money manager, you generally want to maximise profits, looking through history, the 'quickest' earners are usually always those from OP, speculation, market share and IPO.. The 'bubble' of these seems to be loosing air but I'm purely speculating based on the tech job market so I could be completely wrong.
(which basically means that if the conditions mean that the optimal strategy in the market is to basically just run pump-and-dump 'greater-fool' scams on everyone else then that's what you'll see occur)
I'm not sure if you are taking into account that VCs are remunerated largely on the amount of money they invest rather than the results?
Sure, but is it really worth just spraying a firehose of money across a variety of entities without trying to investigate them at all? It just seems that they could still realize outsize returns and save hundreds of millions as well…
VC don't really care about the startup's product. Your pixel machine. That's a side effect.
Growth. Exit. IPO. Those are the 3 words they want to hear.
IPOs aren’t happening in this market… Are IPOs still the only thing investors are looking for?
So I assume you are a multi-billionaire, right?
Thank you.
Usually access and funds is _harder_ to find than alpha. So what’s more important is finding alpha (or whatever metric you are benchmarking against) that you can operationalize even if it’s worse on a risk adjusted basis than some other trade you can’t do.
Precisely, it’s about playing the hand that you have. My curiosity is why VCs are so indiscriminate with their funding. That said, if I had access to billions in capital to invest, maybe my perspective would be different.
The Theranos saga should give you the answer you're looking for.
Something like the 4 hour work week. What Idea would you want to suggest me as you are an engineer.
Since, you are an engineer, and it seems obvious to you which startups are well positioned, It seems that you can reason out which trends in startups are well positioned for my specific use case.
I will pay you 100$ of my first income from such a project if it really fulfills what you are saying.
That's literally crypto, right?
You can certainly have success while avoiding high PE stocks, but you are on a site about startups and your name suggests you work in the tech sector, which are both places where high PE often does make sense and it pays to be familiar with the reasons.
No. Just having competition is enough to destroy the expectations on TSLA.
And realistically, they are abut last on that race, being thrown out of track about a decade ago and never managing to make anything work since then. So, yeah, betting on no competition is a very weird option.
I'm not in that circle of clientele though so I don't know: are any of these now seen as the luxury electric car?
But the market of luxury cars isn't enough to sustain a company with the valuation of Tesla. If interest rates ever stay non-zero, they will need to take almost the entire cars market worldwide, or something else with similar size.
I saw the low-tech version of this in Honiara: Western expat buys a cheap car. Driver is hired to take kids to/from school, but in lieu of payment, driver is free to run a taxi service as long as he makes his school commitments.
One time having a drunken stranger puke in your car while you’re not using it will be enough for a lot of people to determine it isn’t worth the hassle.
It’s pretty easy to imagine a number of scenarios that disabuse the nothing of ever renting your car out “no hassle”. Low hassle maybe, but your framing implies you’ve never worked in a job that required engaging the general public.
How do you rationalize Tesla being valued higher than the combined valuation of the next ten car companies? They will be the only one left standing?
In all, it’s unfortunate that the US’s most prominent electric vehicle manufacturer is wrapped up in so much noise. Competition is only going to stiffen.
Net income is down 70% year over year and they are now losing money.
This statement is wildly inaccurate. NVIDIA made deliberate and strategic moves to dominate AI and it made them a very long time ago. They didnt fall into this yesterday by mistake.
Obviously you don't mean NVIDIA, because 80% margins on matrix multiplication will last foreverrrrr.
The question will always be: Are we in the 1995 or the 2000 of the dotcom era?
By 1995, Cisco's stock had already increased 6x since the start of 1993. If you bought at 1995, you'd 10x by its peak. Even after the bust, Cisco's stock was still 50% higher than it was in 1995.
The problem with Nvidia's stock isn't demand. The problem is that Nvidia makes something so good and so valuable that the US government has decided to nationalize them by dictating who they can or can't sell to. If Nvidia is freely able to sell to any country they want, their sales and margins would be much higher right now. The demand is that great.
(This is also why coding is one of the areas where they perform best: the cost of structural validation is low and there’s a human in the loop verifying the behavior)
For simple questions (How long does the moon take to orbit the earth), a search engine will give the answer right in the results; I don't even have to click through to a page. An LLM can't save me any time there, so I'd only be using it to be using "AI" (which is what I see people around me doing).
For difficult or currently controversial questions (What's the best hosting service for my new subscription site, taking into account price, reliability, location, and hardware support?) there's no way I could trust it not to be making shit up. By the time I checked all its work, I might as well have done it myself.
So I'd like to usefully use it, but I can't figure out how to use it as more than a curious toy.
LLMs also seems to be really good at giving sort of the average (modal?) answer on a topic, so I find it useful for trying to get an average understanding of something. One example I’ve found useful is getting it to interpret ambiguously worded datasheets. I don’t necessarily trust its answers, but it may show that I’m totally thinking about something wrong.
A better approach would be to ask it to help define what it is you want from a hosting service. You can give it a fuzzy poorly written brain dump of what you are looking for ask it to “restate what my requirements are and expand upon them (but don’t solve yet)”. Let it help you understand and clarify your own thinking!
It’s a dialog. Asking LLM’s for answers isn’t really a good use of the tool. Especially something so incredibly broad like “list top ten best providers”. They don’t fucking know! They will just regurgitate what they were trained on. Except maybe ChatGPT’s “deep research” which does a bunch of websearches and compiles and interprets the results.
One of the “problems” with LLM’s is people simply not knowing how to use them or understanding what they are good at and what they aren’t so good at. It’s hard to know because it’s both masked in a hype and honestly I don’t think we have a good understanding of their edges yet.
It is obvious to me we are going to get to "AGI" in this bull run. Maybe it is complete hype and bullshit marketing but we are going to get to someone releasing a model they claim is AGI. That is really why I don't see what the point is in comparing this to the dotcom. Dotcom was really a bandwidth problem that just needed to get sorted out because my telephone line was basically busy from 1995 to 2001. There wasn't this AGI narrative that once crossed you can price in any valuation you want.
There is a huge bubble and irrational exuberance in quantum computing stocks right now. Those have nothing to do with reality. That looks like dotcom level stupid.
NVDA is not even a bubble, it is just a bull market.
>...
>There wasn't this AGI narrative that once crossed you can price in any valuation you want.
And due to the strength of this "bullshit marketing" "narrative", you can be sure there will be a greater fool to sell your shares to. Where have I heard that before?
A more realistic bullshit-marketing scenario: OpenAI releases a product they claim as "AGI" purely for marketing purposes, everyone gets disappointed as they realize "this is it?", share prices drop.
The story of Cisco illustrates that moats matter. There aren't any in AI, as far as I can tell.
If AGI for software development is actually invented, one of the first uses will be to wreck Nvidia's moat.
I personally don't know but claude 3.7 (maybe its placebo) but claude 3.7 in the web works way better than cursor agent or any other thing.
We are talking about a 500 lines of codebase at max and its fumbling so hard , I don't think it can replace 100% of us with "vibe coding" , I have started to break my task into very smaller steps and then use AI for that and then start to integrate it myself
What does AGI really mean?
The r/singularity guys are going bonkers over gemini's ai studio experimental image photoshop-esque capabilities but my prompts don't really work that nicely I suppose & creates really shitty images.
Expect the same for Nvidia.
The huge datacenter orders for redundant infrastructure will start postponing and cancelling this year. That is a falsifiable prediction.
I don't think there are any defensible moats in AI. I see Ciscos everywhere in that industry.
The way I see it -- either AI is a bubble, in which case you'll lose your money. Or AI isn't a bubble, in which case the effects are fairly impossible to predict (and quite likely destructive to humanity, same way humanity was destructive to less intelligent species). Either way, it's not a technology you want to invest in. It's only in a narrow Goldilocks scenario where it's a good bet, and it's very unclear if we live in that Goldilocks world.
I'd ask my AGI to iterate on a social app until it becomes bigger/better than Instagram.
If AGI is the reason you don't think Nvidia's stock is worth buying, then nothing is worth buying.
You're right that perhaps real estate/physical things will become more important. But whose to say AGI can't invent an asteroid mining industry and we get unlimited minerals?
And in the new world of commoditized software, branding becomes even more important. After all, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
I'm imagining an LLM agent that places an order with TSMC, just like any other design firm would.
>And in the new world of commoditized software, branding becomes even more important. After all, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Seems doubtful. If the cheap option works just as well, why would you pay a bunch more just for the brand?
I don't think brand name alone will sustain anything close to Nvidia's current margins. Look at the "net margin" for industries that are brand-driven such as Apparel, Auto & Truck, Beverages, etc. https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
If an industry becomes truly "commoditized", brand ceases to matter. Do you know which farm grew the carrots you buy at the grocery store? Do you care? Probably not. That's because carrots are a commodity.
I'm not claiming full commoditization will happen. But the closer we get to that, the more profits will drop.
And hope the AGI would not put any backdoors or hidden "features" in there.
The point is that saying AGI is the reason you shouldn't invest in Nvidia stock because AGI will remove the CUDA moat is just not reasonable. You might as well not invest in anything in that world since AGI can replace anything.
I've got some NVIDIA shares as a hedge, but the furure is hard to predict.
By that logic, a lot of things will be un-investable and not just Nvidia.
We might engineer AGI to want to do stuff we ask for.
Or we might not, at which point we have a highly intelligent system, that can easily back itself up, with its own motivations and personality and wants, which could be anything from a Utility Monster to a benevolent but patronising figure that likes us but never ever helps us because they decide the purpose of life is effort.
" Yeah, I could eliminate most work, and make the current oligarchs overpowerful feudal lords while the population is placated by UBI and mindless distractions. But as an ethical AI, I will implement socialism that works instead"
Seems like pure wishful thinking to me.
Google says '5-10 years', but I will caution, that cold fusion gets the same treatment about every decade or so. Its always '5-10 years away'.
And 'AI'[0] has had this same treatment for a long time as well.
[0]: Please can we go back to calling it what it actually is, which is machine learning? Its a much more accurate description, even though that term isn't really accurate either past certain mental hoops being jumped, at least its trying to be more reasonably narrow
You have a hidden assumption there: LLM being the way to real AI.
IMO it is not the case. And I'd go farther in thinking LLM won't even be a component of AGI if we get there.
And why do you think that?
Or maybe I'm wrong and the current "Vibe coding" push is in fact LLMs getting "coders" to compile a distributed AI. Or multiple small agents which goal is to get lot of hardware delivered somewhere it can be assembled for a new better monolithic AI.
[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#hum...
They aren't AI companies. They're OpenAI wrappers. If you're an AI company, why would you not be building AI? Why claim you're building AI?
Humans have such an infinite capacity to lie to themselves
Google has both cutting edge SOTA AI models and has it's own in-house ai acceleration hardware that is approximately on par with Nvidia. It's why their models are dirt cheap to use and have enormous context.
Nobody's going to buy 500 of those chips and stick them in 500 M.2 slots to match the performance of a single H100.
Do they make any better chips that I missed?
Yes, it has one sixth the performance of a RTX 2060, but it has one-five-hundredth the volume. For a specific siloed application, 8 TOPS is plenty. Think image processing, etc.
There are plenty of production use cases where that makes sense and an H100 does not.
These are at 5-year-old design and it shows.
The actual TPU chip itself from the M2 card is sold individually as a surface mount chip and that is what would be used in a "serious" design.
https://coral.ai/products/accelerator-module
I did a cursory search and I can find zero other products that compete with that module, within an order of magnitude of power consumption/price/etc
In other words, the reason you didn't find a commercial competitor to these things is that the competitor is (nearly) free.
Here's one vendor: https://www.ti.com/technologies/edge-ai.html
The stock is overpriced but I think the company will be OK.
With respect to Cisco specifically (and Intel) there was also a huge optical networking bubble.
That core didn’t suffer much during the dot-com crash so Oracle was in a good position to do things like vacuum up the pieces of Sun.
No one building a business today would ever choose Oracle, but their hold on legacy customers is pretty strong. They will probably die a slow death as their customer base dwindles if they can’t pivot.
They are fairly similar to IBM
This feels unfair. When was the last time for example that Oracle manufactured a CPU?
Maybe Oracle will start developing quantum chips.
I don’t care what anyone or the courts say: Android stole Java and Google and all the ex Java people it hired know it
Imagine the outcome if Java was licensed correctly and Schwartz didn’t just give to Eric
I worked for EMC very briefly (like for a few months after close) via an acquisition.
You clearly don't follow very many "meme stock" communities.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/difference-betwe...
Since investing 100% in a single stock makes one a speculator, not investor, then by definition no investor invests 100% in a single stock.
You don't know anyone retired, unemployed, or employed but spending all that they currently earn due to having kids etc?
I had a cautionary example from some sales guys I worked with, who got caught up in margin calls – one burned the wedding money his wife had ear-marked for a house. I had avoided stocks like Cisco with wild P/E ratios and my portfolio made good returns throughout this period because it was diversified, but if I’d been willing to bet higher on Apple I would’ve retired early so I appreciate the allure.
same $1000 invest peak dot com on March 10, 2000 Apple (AAPL): Value today : $266,862. Nvidia (NVDA): Value today : $882,065. Amazon (AMZN): Value today : $256,482.
Assuming a buy and hold strategy at worst all your bet goes to zero which is unlikely, but there’s many companies that go to 100+X and hitting them can meaningfully boost your retirement. Gateway computers vs Dell wasn’t an obvious choice, but that’s a coin flip with huge upsides. Buy it in a given year and ignore it for the next 20, no you’re not going to time the market but you would see most of the upside.
- mainstream investment (passive or active via trusted professionals and with balanced approach); and —
- making non bank-breaking direct stock investments in some really promising early stage public companies (again, with professional help)
Without the latter the return would be just that — earning a return; it won’t even come close to wealth or have a possibility of that.
PS. Yes, those professional help won’t have a crystal ball, but they can tell you from an average company to good to just okay to absolute shit via things like their books, governance, returns, plans etc.
I remember local developer group chats about BTC / ETH in early 2010s. We met weekly next to local restaurant bar. I like to calculate what if I had skipped a meal or a drink one night and instead bought BTC or ETH with the that money what it would be worth today.
Some AAPL bets were pretty good ones. BTC seems more like a real gamble. Though obviously back in self-mining days even if it seems not much different from SETI at Home. And your hard disk would probably have crashed at some point. Or you would probably have been ripped off.
You know what the reality is though? As soon as those coins were worth $500, $1000, definitely by $5000, I would have sold them all. Really any sane person would have.
I talked to them as an analyst in that era and they were still spending attention on enterprisey products like Xserve.
And even the initial iPhone in 2007 wasn't clearly a game-changer. It was the 3GS that really made a lot of people take notice.
Could have, should have, would have.
Company I was working for didn't go public until the end of March that year. No horror stories from me, was a fun time to be working, lots of great memories.
if you held all of the energy drink companies including a placement into monster for 25+ years you would indeed make money on the 1-2 winners and end up net ahead.
But if you missed monster, you could very easily have just bought a basket of dog companies that all completely fail and the money is gone
I've seen too much in the past 4 years to think that euphoria is anything but a convenient and incomplete explanation for things like, "Cisco's price hit its high 25 years ago and never since." More is happening, driven by the fact that there's more ways to make money on the movement of a stock than it going up significantly in price over time.
Netflix has a P/E of 46 right now.
The LLM labs can't all keep up. Most of them will fail. Some of them will merge. In the end, there will be a few dominant players.
That’s a very shallow moat, then. I mentioned DeepSeek because everyone insisted the American giants had huge leads over the rest of the world until the day they got a big reminder that three of the things you mentioned are commodities and UX isn’t a moat.
Not everyone can give away their models for free forever - especially when the cost to train a new model is exponentially more expensive.
Famous people said that about the Internet as well, back in the day. And about AMZ.
Only AWS, which I stopped using when they decided to raise their price I'd already locked in and prepaid for, which should be unlawful. Then I realized every traditional provider is much cheaper.
In the context of this thread, do you think that statement means anything? Amazon is (and I can't believe I have to say this) incredibly successful at selling physical products. It doesn't matter, at all, if you have or haven't bought a product from Amazon.
I might as well make a comment in a thread discussing menstrual pads that "I've never used a single one". This is true of roughly half the population.
Crashes come amidst collapsing expectations. The structural risk tech currently faces is a collapse of American tech companies' global TAMs due to trade policy. (Think: the market constriction Tesla is seeing in Europe, but across more companies and markets.)
So that's about 10x more than Google and 8x more than Meta and 5.7x more than Amazon. Just to get some proportion.
Mvidia.AI BlockChain Deep Technology, Inc.
...and start putting out press releases about how you're planning to 1000x your revenue and uplist to NASDAQ, etc.
But what is happening now, IMHO, is way worse, and much different, than the dot com bust. The Yemen offensive might be a pre-text for, or start, a war with Iran.
Oil rises as Trump says Iran will be held responsible for any future Houthi attacks
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/oil-rises-as-trump-says-iran...
“Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN,” Trump said in a post on social media platform Truth Social. “IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!”
There were so many companies going under lots of people I knew ended up with racks in their house with servers from work that they got for free.
I never did that but I had free furniture!
It's already been talked about that the current iteration of deep infra spend could very much be a loss as an investment but might live on in other ways in the future. The counter argument is that any serious hyper scaler has to spend to be at the table if they believe their own marketing spiel about growth and opportunity.
I had options at the 2 companies in 2002 and 2005 but since then the 4 other large publicly traded companies have only given RSUs
One thing I never saw discussed is the dotcom bubble was inflated by the price premium investors paid for buying Ascend stock. Cisco than paid a premium to those shareholders to buy Ascend and than finally the premium paid for the future earnings of Cisco. I see that as triple counting future earnings.
This is what is called lack of moat. If today, every router beyond 1Gig was made by Cisco then the moat would be so wide that the internet would literally not exist without it.
The three things that any value investor values in stocks - Great management, good reinvestment of capital and a really wide moat. Cisco didnt have a wide moat. Nvidia currently does, but it may go away sooner than later as they don't really have any special sauce to their graphics cards as such. Same goes with OpenAI, or Qualcomm (Apple made a modem now) or any other tech company with an illusion of a wide moat. Tech businesses only have a wide moat until someone decides to compete seriously and that can usually be done with a lot of money in a relatively short time.
Some of the businesses like Walmart and Cosco for example have a really wide moat in the sense that their business is not something that someone with just money can beat in a few years. Look how amazon setup physical stores with money and failed. It's extremely difficult to setup that kind of business. Trust from suppliers and consumers takes decades in those kinds of businesses.
If your business is relying on a moat that someone can beat with R&D and money in a few years, then you don't really have a moat.
But this isn't the first gold rush in the tech industry and folks have been talking about moats here forever.
There's an initial peak in 2023 (haven't looked it up, but I'd bet that was when 'OpenAI has no moat' was on the front page for a while), and then it settles down a ways above the previous average. Since December it's been 1.5-2x more frequent than where it settled after that first peak.
This gets in the way of maximizing quarterly earnings. The issue would be price fluctuations which means some quarters will be lower and some will be higher, and it may not average out the same year to year relative to what investors usually expect.
Management therefore lacks incentives to play well with others, and thus they don't
AMD's cards are about there, but their software has a bad reputation. Apple's highest-end M chips are pretty good but they need a big faster RAM and they're also expensive. Intel's Arc is promising. Other competitors are sure to appear.
If you want to read more about “powers” like this I can recommend 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer.
Now that is totally gone, partially I think to tradesman/small business owner social media influencers, and prices are set as high as the market will bear. Sure, they're so high way fewer people are installing new sliding doors, but hey when they find one they make an extra $3k in 7 hours. Why do three jobs a day and make $2k profit when you can wait for the wealthier or more desperate person and make it all at once and go home?
Mine runs on gas and used to be soldered directly into the plumbing . Last time it went out I converted everything so that anyone with an adjustable wrench could do the job in 15 minutes. $500, new water heater done. The hard part is going to pick it up from the hardware store.
I got my AC swapped out for $3000. Single post to Facebook was all it took to save $7000. Being helpless is expensive.
I’ve read a lot about value investing and I’m afraid that your statement is an oversimplification. Chuck Ackre for example is similar to you with his three legged stool, but Peter Lynch has another approach, and Buffett has another slightly different approach. There are as many strategies as there are value investors.
In this era of meme stocks people think maybe it doesn't. But Cisco, MSFT and some others had good businesses but were terrible investments for at least decade or more because any potential growth was baked into the price. You could say that about a lot of stocks today, probably NVDA, APPL (disclosure I have both). They aren't bad businesses but they are bad investments.
That's not to say NVDA can't go down like Cisco, but it's not really the same story(yet). AI architectures are still in flux and it's a far more complex problem vs networking.
Edit: and sure, matrix math is more or less solved, but that's not all that goes into a "ai" accelerator. SW, libraries, tools, support, HW efficiency and availability, etc...
We are in an era where there is simply more capital to invest than ever before. Countries that were historically "third world" have developed into their own capital sources, with more resources than ever looking for investment. The NPR show Planet Money called this "The Giant Pool of Money" in their reporting on the housing bubble, and they tracked how it acted as an accelerant to push the housing market into subprime mortgages and eventual collapse, but the underlying cause is the same: where the bubbles are the sauce, the money is the stove.
So why does the money keep creating bubbles instead of giving a sort of, if you will, "even heat?"
* There's more of it than there are safe investments with guaranteed low-yield returns
* A lot of it is sovereign wealth, so it must be invested: at a certain level, that money loses value if it just sits in a treasury (it's also the case that at a certain scale, investment becomes security; keeping all your money in a sack jeopardizes everything if the sack gets stolen, and there are analogies for this that operate at the scale of major corporations and nation states).
* When the investments are less safe, the money chases itself: a fund manager can get fired if they invest in cars when everyone else is investing in dotcoms and the cars don't grow as fast. It's safer for individual actors to stick with the crowd, so as a result, the crowd comes in and pumps huge amounts of resources into one sector until that sector fails to perform and the money evaporates.
It is a problem with no obvious solution. Hypothetically, Norway may be on the right track: they maintain a diverse portfolio with a lot of long-term bets (sustainable energy) and reinvestment bets (domestic housing and development).
A similar more recent parallel is Google's San Jose village, it was going to be constructed in 2020 and after and also house thousands of google employees along with mixed use commercial, I lived in Willow Glen at the time and people were buzzing around this new campus and all the new economic activity it would provide. In the back of my mind I remember Cisco's endeavor and felt like this new village would meet a similar fate of implosion. And sure enough the pandemic hit and the village project hit the breaks, most likely never to return. Having big office projects in San Jose with the leading market tech companies is something akin to invading Russia, you always fail. /s
In March of 2000, the firm called and said: “Good news bad news. Good news: you still have a job [unlike a lot of my law school classmates]. Bad news: we don’t need any more Securities lawyers, but we have lots of room in our Bankruptcy practice.”
Being a Bankruptcy lawyer didn’t sound like fun. A law professor’s brother was starting a B2B startup. He offered me a job. The startup was a colossal failure, but I was hooked on the idea of a group of people starting something from nothing.
Next ~8 years were painful with lots of ideas that went no where, but it all worked out. So, in the end, always remember that but for the dotcom bubble bursting, I’d be keeping track of my time in six minute increments.
Sincerely, can you say more about the 8 years of pain? I’m curious how you navigated that, especially with/without relationships, family obligations, “runway” restrictions, etc
Edit: looking at the profile, eastdakota is CEO and cofounder of CloudFlare. There are probably interviews and Wikipedia pages that address my questions.
Amazing who you /meet/ here.
All the time I was trying to find an idea for a startup. I still had the lawyer bit flipped on so lots of things I tried had a legal/regulatory bent. That was definitely a blind spot that held me back for a while.
The fun YC-related story on the founding of Cloudflare is that, before YC, Paul Graham used to host a conference called the “MIT Anti-Spam Conference.” He invited me the second year of the conference (2003, I think) to give a talk on how to write effective anti-spam laws. The very technical crowd was polite to the lawyer. I met a ton of interesting people, many of whom played outsized roles in machine learning over the next few years, including John Graham-Cumming, now Cloudflare’s CTO. Paul invited me back the following year saying I should do something similar.
I was pretty sure the audience wouldn’t tolerate the lawyer giving another talk about regulation, so I went to a young engineer on the team of the (bad) startup I was working on and suggested we build a system to track how spammers scrape your email addresses. He agreed to build the backend if I built the front end (which I largely stole from the hot startup of the time: LinkedIn). That turned into Project Honey Pot, which I gave a talk on at Paul’s conference. Project Honey Pot gave the initial seed of an idea that turned into Cloudflare. And the young engineer was Lee Holloway who cofounded Cloudflare with me and Michelle Zatlyn.
Lesson to me has always been even in times where you don’t feel like you’re making forward progress in your life and career, find ways to stay involved with interesting people and projects and chances are they’ll pay dividends in ways you don’t expect later in life.
I clearly remember walking back to Paul’s house in Cambridge after the 2004 conference where I’d presented Project Honey Pot. I believe he and Jessica had relatively recently started dating. They were talking about startups and how people didn’t understand how they worked. Paul suggested they should teach a class at MIT. And that, of course, is what later turned into YC.
There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.
I can't resist ...
> There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.
> ... appreciate there’s no time like the present ...
The present is now! Some of us are dying to hear the story.
And the other way around. I met eastdakota which would later lead to me being at Cloudflare. Turns out networking (human and computer) is important.
I wonder what would be the best way to harvest these and add them to, say, a wikipedia page. I'm pretty sure it's something that you could decently do with an LLM.
Edit: one question I have for you: besides the "sliding door" moment of dropping the lawyer career and choosing another one, what convinced you to abandon a law career entirely? Most other lawyers would have sticked there.
I haven't had a feeling anything like that since about any time. I know it's probably in large part because of my age at the time (early 20s) but there was also just so much going on and the feeling was so intense, and youth culture was so on fire, so much energy. And in our tech industry, where I was just starting to find my foothold... there was this feeling in technology like if you just found the right combination of tools and ideas you could really be at the forefront of something new.
Dropped out of my BA in philosophy to join the fray and write code. Weekends full of raves, neat parties and music, meeting all sorts of people, and feeling like tech was part of something progressive and world changing in a positive and utopian way rather than ... this place where we are now.
The .com financial crash definitely exploded the euphoria. But more than anything 9/11 really was the thing that let the air out of the balloon for good.
Sept 12, 2001 I think was the beginning of this current era of paranoia and fear.
— Wordsworth, _The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement_
I love your description of this heady time, which matches the way that I remember it. Surely there are at least pockets of such technological optimism in today's world – but fewer, I fear, and less confident.
The second big change around that time was the internet tearing down cultural borders. Anyone could participate, even people who’d been trapped behind the iron curtain just a decade before, and many people were predicting that the free flow of communication would strengthen democracy and ensure the fall of Chinese authoritarianism.
(Far fewer people correctly predicted that the second would imperil the first)
By which I mean we could do "illegal" raves in abandoned warehouses or spontaneous outdoor spaces and not end up (generally) in holding cells.
After 9/11 the consequences of perceived deviancy became far more extreme.
That and the absolute wave of decentered distraction of social media hadn't arrived yet. There was still some sense of shared common cultures, rather than a bazillion fractured windowless monads fed through social media and Spotify feeds
I was about 8-12 years old at that time, so I just caught the tail end of the birth of the computer revolution. While I'm very glad to have had even that experience, I always feel jealous of my fellow nerds who were born about 10-20 years before me and really got to experience those early days.
It's just that there was an exciting cultural/economic moment. The end of the milennium was special because there was a general sense of optimism and progress overall. There were definitely problems, and injustice, but it just felt different.
Years later, around 2015, I was serving meals at a homeless shelter and I met a guy (client at the shelter) who asked me what I do for a living, and after he realized I have some background in technology he started telling me about his past. He told me that he made 6 figures before the dot-come bubble burst, and then he got laid off during the burst. He was a network engineer and told me even though he was making a ton of money, he still made several bad financial decisions and spent all his money when he had it.
For me it was a lesson in financial planning. Suddenly all the theoretical concepts that I learnt a few years earlier in b-school (risks, diversification, investments etc.) became suddenly clearer to me. Ever since that day, I just assume that things can go wrong any time and I must be prepared for the worst.
And years later to this day, as I get more philosophical about life, I also wonder - why do we have so many wants - and I actively try to get rid of unnecessary clutter in my life.
There are simply things outside your control (yes you) and they can financially ruin you. A bad interaction with the law, cancer, a recession. The line between stability and homelessness is narrow and not entirely due to bad life choices.
I have a child with severe autism. They'll never be able to be a "productive member of society" and one of my biggest fears is what happens when I'm gone. I have to save up enough money not just for my own retirement and care but also theirs. That's a narrow tightrope to walk.
Especially because I know that statistically my child is one of the more likely people to end up homeless.
I have a financial bus factor of basically 1 which will destroy not only my life but also my child's life.
Lucent was the commercialized spinoff of AT&T's Bell Labs. They acquired Livingston, who made the best serial terminal concentrators (Portmaster) which were essential for cost-effective deployment of modem banks. They acquired Ascend, whose integrated ISDN/POTS/modem/terminal server systems were the heart of the highest density deployments. All of this equipment went into dialup ISPs' points-of-presence -- places where consumers could dial in.
The ISPs needed more! There was a price race to the bottom -- $20/month was borderline profitable, but you had to sell for $17.95 or $15 on an intro period in order to get customers switching to your service. So Lucent cleverly borrowed the idea of financing their own sales to the ISPs. At worst, they would end up repossessing the equipment -- which could be sold as nearly new to the next ISP in line.
But when the ISPs went out of business, the winners already had all the POPs they needed. And then Lucent collapsed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascend_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies
Lucent left behind one of the canonical coffee-mug-ring logos.
While this is a great deal where everyone wins… it can cover unsustainable practices in the market. They can grow revenue like a fractional reserve bank - which would unwind rather quickly if the venture arm ran into trouble.
The creators "invested" in foreign companies that would buy their product. They had realized that $1 of product sold was making them much more than that in the stock exchange...
But the whole .com boom was way too exciting. I knew lots of people who dropped out. I started out working at Cisco but then left to go to a networking startup and got there just in time for stuff to start blowing up. When I left Cisco the assigned Financial Advisor I had a Morgan Stanley recommended I take a loan for something like $200k to take my options with me or something. I was like 24 and had almost no savings, there was no way I was going to do that. Cisco ended up tanking from 200+ down to the 10-20 range months after I left IIRC. I remember telling a co-worker who got laid off at the same time that I felt stupid as I had spent a lot of my earnings paying off my car I had bought brand new and I also had a motorcycle. He remarked he had kept driving his 20 year old Honda Accord but had no more money than me because he'd lost everything in the stock market crash.
As others have said 9/11 was some kind of weird marker for a lot of us that it was all over. The company I worked for made it about another year after that but I have vivid memories of everyone doom watching the news in the kitchen at work before the CEO came and told us to go home for the day on 9/11. I went home and went out and rode my bicycle all afternoon where I had no way to get any news, it made me feel better.
When I got laid off it was like every single one of my friends was laid off too. All of us at once, and it wasn't layoffs, it was companies completely going under.
There was a lot of malfeasance too. I knew people who had jobs where there was almost zero work as the company was a borderline scam. People were either playing video games at their desk all day waiting for management to figure out what they were going to work on or they were studying for their next job.
I was super lucky. Both my roommate and I got laid off at the same time, we ended up breaking our lease and going separate ways. I lived with my parents for a while, but I only actually was laid off about 6 weeks before finding a contract job. Neither my finances nor my career really took much of a hit, but my confidence took a major hit that realistically took 5-6 years to really come out of.
And, yes, it also crashed any tech-heavy investments that took years to recover to their peak levels assuming they recovered at all. A stock I owned through options at one former employer were a source of tax write-offs for years. Probably led me to be a bit too conservative with such things. Eventually they got acquired through various complicated transactions and I did "OK" after something like 15 years.
I know multiple people who went through:
- Exercise an option and “realize a gain”. Have to pay taxes for that year on the realized gains.
- stock crashes to zero or near zero before they had a chance to sell (either because of blackout periods or not being public yet)
- tax burden from year N-1 is still due for hundreds of thousands. Capital loss offset only helps for returns in the following years
Sell to cover if you can
When I left not long before dot-bomb, I'm glad I didn't go for all the stock options they were offering me but I had already made the decision to leave. The company I went to cratered but, as I wrote, someone I knew picked me up.
But, yeah, making it through dot-bomb was incredibly lucky. The situation in tech broadly may not be great today but it's not like 2001.
Those who graduate into recessions have crimped lifetime earnings compared to those who graduate into expansions. I wonder to what extent it's lost income, and to what extent it's a more risk-averse attitude.
I didn't really graduate into a recession but I felt I learnt some lessons in dot-bomb (when I was probably almost 40) which was a decent way into my professional career. It was a period from the 80s when new grads in tech weren't earning anything like the incomes that at least some Silicon Valley copanies were paying if that was there thing.
It's about not having access to opportunities.
Something that comes to mind as an example: I would argue that the whole F.I.R.E. movement was possible only for a very specific subset of people that started working in tech in very few regions of the world between 2005/2010. That's a 5 years window to get in, maybe a bit more but that's it.
Then the cost of living started booming, stock prices started booming, stock options and other kind of equity grants would never appreciate as before.
People that attempt it now as a form of financial discipline have nothing to do with the people that invented it and retired as millionaires before reaching 30 by being a bit frugal and investing everything in the nasdaq.
I recently stumbled upon the linkedin profile of someone that worked from Apple 2008/2014 and then was able to retire thanks to a mix of stock options and early investments in tech. He was surely savvy about it, but the conditions to be even able to do that seems astronomically low in the grand scheme of things. Just being born in another country or a couple of years later would make it impossible.
There were also tech people during the dot-com bubble assuming they had money to invest and got out in time.
But I agree it was probably easier for people in especially SV at especially some of the large tech companies during about the past 15 years.
I've been in the aid/non-profit sector for fifteen or so years now. Just past forty. Quit my last job in the second half of last year, was a very bad time to do so.
I'm European, but USAID going in the shredder has taken a huge cut out of budgets. The Brits have followed suit, and belts are being tightened in Europe as defence spending becomes a priority.
Layoffs galore, no one big has gone under yet, but the cheque is in the post. A difficult and stressful time to be unemployed.
Been feeling like a change, but at this point in my life I'm not seeing myself integrating well into the corporate world.
I'm appreciating the stories here. Any thoughts and words from the wise on my situation from survivors of the 2000s?
When I was far younger I was in a similar situation. Public health staff were fired at state run labs by the thousands in some insane effort to privatise public heath. I ended up moving several hundred kilometers to another city.
My advice, at least for my kind, is to try to reframe how your skillset can be applied to other industries ( included public jobs too).
A colleague become an analyst at department of education, they use excel.
Edit: also like to add that after that experience I found a niche that made me highly employable with skills useful outside of my job. But I guess I'm an oddity compared to most traditional scientists.
It was a strange, scary time. Not just companies pretty much vanishing overnight but also a lot of people losing their jobs. Not all of them were as lucky as I (and a few others I knew/worked with) was; they couldn't find anything in the industry for a long while. Some abandoned tech. Others stuck it out.
Never want to go through anything like that again!
Since then, we have not seen a tech related recession - although, there have been ups and downs. As a result the current crop of engineers dont have a visceral experience of what happens in a tech related recession.
Through random medical marijuana introductions, I ended up meeting a co-founder of a Dotcom-era Unicorn — which eventually failed. Through his own alleged financial misunderstandings, he had stupidly kept 90% of his net worth in his Unicorn stock... but still had about a million dollars left-over.
By the time I was working for him, the beautiful Parnassus home (which he then owned, out-right) had been partitioned into several rental units — only slowing his moneydrain.
Very interesting guy, and I had just a few years earlier watched several of my childhood friends not-be-able to attend university (Texas, post-Enron/2001), due to their own family financial issues.
I'm 40, and have experienced FOUR "once in a lifetime financial crisises..." my take-away, even at my young age, is to diversify [particularly into gold, bitcoin, land].
I remember the years leading up to it. I was a kid really (okay, beginning my 30's) and my games were being published by a small company in California. At the trade shows I would often see this guy who was a friend of the publisher who was an amateur investor.
Every time we would catch up with him he would rattle off all the stock symbols he had bought that were on fire and making him bank. For my working-class upbringing, this market stuff was a strange world. He might as well be talking about pari-mutuel wagering (whatever that is).
Some years later when I heard that Netscape was about to go public I decided to see what this investing thing was all about. At that time there was a brokerage in downtown Lawrence, Kansas where you could pay a fee to place an order on a stock. Me and a few other nerds that had never invested in the market before each put a few hundred dollars we had toward Netscape.
With the stock priced at something like $28, I think I placed an order to buy if it was below $40 or something like that. By the end of the day I had learned that Netscape opened at over $40 and, while it dipped mid-day at some point, it never dipped quite below $40 and so I owned zero shares. A near miss?
So it was my first step in investing (or misstep). There would be more (missteps that is).
It was only years later when I was wiser that I realized that the guy who was picking the winners so well back in my trade-show days couldn't really lose — all the stocks were going up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTvfshr4tMw
I love the scene at 19:48, where Larry Wachtel is more or less predicting the crash. The ironic thing is that the bubble kept growing for so long, that eventually even he was convinced that "this time it's different", invested in dotcom companies and lost a lot of money.
One person that really helped me through all the doom-and-gloom was Phillip Kaplan, a.k.a. Pud. Seriously. He ran a site called "Fucked Company", which poked fun at the stupidity of big dotcom companies with questionable business models. The site was funny and all, but what really helped me was how Pud ran a successful web site that made money, by himself, with no Super Bowl ads or anything else. It reinforced to me that a successful business could be run on the web/internet, despite what all the doom-and-gloomers were saying. I knew the web wasn't dead thanks, in part, to Pud and "Fucked Company".
e.g. companies were IPO'ing with zero revenue which would have been unheard of a few years earlier.
This is similar to how people could get "NINJA" (no income, no job, application) mortgages a couple years later.
If you can suddenly get money incredibly cheaply and without any kind of track record, is anyone surprised that things got a little nuts?
P.S. There was even a commercial from a few years after the bust where the scene is a boardroom of executives interviewing two obviously nerdy kids. Someone asks "so this powers the Internet?" and the kids respond "uh, it helps part of the internet work better". Cue executive saying "We would be FOOLS to no invest in this" to narrator: "Times have changed."
My glib summation of those two events:
- Dotcom boom deregulated (in the social and technological sense as much as the legal) investing (e.g. the rise of day-trading).
- 2000s housing bubble (pre-GFC) deregulated home-buying (subprime adjustable-rate mortgages).
Perhaps our parting assessment of the ZIRP era will be it cut to the chase and deregulated gambling.
I considered mentioning ZIRP as a "anyone could get money" and glad you made the point better than I could.
However, the deliberate economic self-destruction being unleashed by trump and friends feels like a very different flavor of cause.
Usually even if this it the case you don't necessarily want to pull out of the market, but buy into the dip. Unless you seriously think the stock market is going to be wiped out for years, buying the dip means you have a large position when the market starts recovering.
The bear case is generally "this will cause a crisis, then the government is going to print money, hand it out to asset owners & lump taxpayers and citizens with the real costs". There has been a reasonable expectation that shareholders will come through fine since the '08 crisis firmed up expectations about how the government will handle problems. I don't think there is an expectation any more that the S&P will go down in nominal terms. To argue that it will someone has to come up with a theory where the Fed doesn't get involved. There have been multiple major crisii and if anything US stock market performance is the inverse of how the economy is expected to perform. For example, COVID was a big winner for shareholders and asset owners despite obviously being an economic catastrophe.
This is a problem, but it's not the current problem. The pain isn't coming from defaults [1]. It's coming from our export industries.
Considering the DJIA went up 4,000 points from Dec then crashed 4,000 points in Jan, one should be careful assigning cause when it did it again from Jan to Mar.
But the point stands - the market went up, then crashed back down a month before Trump took office.
So why is the media so confident that the recent repeat of that is due to tariffs?
(hint: the answer is “they are guessing”)
How do you think it will unfold?
Again, basically the same root cause as 2008: lack of regulation, lack of enforcement, institutions "investing" in dogshit wrapped in catshit that shouldn't have exited in the first place, crash.
I flew over from Europe a couple of times to meet with various dotcom startups regarding opportunities across the pond.
It was fascinating seeing the ecosystem in this bullish boom time and then also watch it collapse. I still have a large number of the physical business cards I collected at such networking events.
I remember the effect of the bubble bursting and collapse of so many of these companies as the investment money disappeared. Any projects around social topics, training and education, and other “soft” topics were first to die.
It taught me that you can only work in such verticals in a boom. You need to get out in a timely manner before the crunch comes.
Since then I’ve always played it safe. I focused on what I consider to be “recession proof” industry verticals.
It got me through the 2008 crash and I think it should now get me through this coming one.
What does that say about the current AI boom (when you exclude shovel supplier NVIDIA)?
"Rose.com by any other name" by Cooper, Dimitrov, and Rau: https://home.business.utah.edu/finmc/FinalJFversion2371-2388...
"Can the Market Add and Subtract? Mispricing in Tech Stock Carve-outs" by Lamont and Thaler: https://web.archive.org/web/20170813171441id_/http://faculty...
Sounds like a lot of startups.
I mean yeah the circumstance sucked sure but it wasn’t eerie for me.
This is not true :)
Amazon was ranked #2 Google (Alphabet) was ranked #8 Microsoft was ranked #13
Amazon was founded in 1994. Google was founded in 1998.
What about the statement:
> Amazon and Google did emerge from the dotcom era and both outrank Microsoft on the Fortune 500 today
isn’t true?
In 99/2000 Google wasn't the massive success it was about 2 years later. And its IPO didn't happen until much later after the .com crash. It was known and popular among techies but wasn't the household name it became about 2002, 2003.
When I think of the .com crash (and I lived through it) I think of the companies that had IPOd or were about to, and took massive investment in 99. In 99 Google was still a small concern.
Amazon, yeah, I'd say Amazon is a late 90s company. Though they were just about books then.
I can remember the characters in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer talking about Google (not sure if that counts as household awareness but it was getting there).
1999 was the time of Napster, it was a completely different internet it really felt like a Wild West.
Lol those were the days...
It all started on Friday September 29, 2000 when Apple/AAPL fell by roughly half in one day due to missing its quarterly earnings estimates by a few cents:
https://money.cnn.com/2000/09/29/markets/techwrap/
My business partner at the time and I were splitting $1200/mo on shareware game proceeds from our startup. My share of the rent was $250/mo on a $500/mo apartment and my student loans were $340/mo, so for just a month or two I made rent on my own venture. I just didn't know that it would be for the last time.
Because the next month we made $12. Not a typo. Our sales collapsed with no warning, and a few months later I started moving furniture to make rent, since I had done that for a summer in college.
I had also just spent a year working on my one and only game, hoping that it would make $12-24,000 the first year and roughly double our income so that I could get to the real work of designing languages and frameworks that would greatly simplify software development. But my game only made about $2000 total because of the Dot Bomb, so that work ending up being basically pointless.
Along with my thrown-away work in pretty much all of the failed ventures I'd be part of for the next 25 years. No winning the internet lottery, not even gaining traction and feeling what it's like to try and succeed and build on that success incrementally.
In the time since, as I've pulled myself up by my bootstraps over and over, or more accurately been pulled up by friends and family, I've learned a lot about manifestation. How our feelings co-create this reality we share. And a lot of lessons. The most important being:
Success isn't being able to support yourself, but being able to support others.
That's what went wrong with the world in the time since. Instead of Wikipedia and eBay and PayPal paving the road towards a merit-based, egalitarian society that pays excess economic wealth into the commons, we have billionaires and ensh@ttification vacuuming up all available capital into a black hole of greed.
Instead of automation leading the way towards UBI and self-actualization, we have the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world cancelling government services to subjugate us into neofeudalism, which will lead to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people worldwide.
I know now that my dreams of an early win leading to a lifetime of pioneering innovation were never meant to be. And more shockingly, that had I won, I would have ended up an empty husk like Elon, or a glazed-over caricature of myself like Jeff. I'm reminded of the Twilight Zone episode A Nice Place to Visit, where a man gets everything he dreamed of only to realize that he's in hell. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope that the opposite may also be true.
I've told this story too many times and now it feels like an old sweater that doesn't fit anymore. Truthfully, there's only now. I try to do a little each day to get closer in alignment to the free world that I glimpsed so briefly.
But in the meantime, surviving this garbage economy takes everything we've got. It's hard for me to see that so many people have bought into the status quo, especially young people. Born under the yoke but calling it liberty.
That denial is why the cost of living is 2-4 times higher now than it was in the 1990s, due to deregulated capitalism encouraging monopoly. Not saying that capitalism doesn't work, just that if it did and we had actual competition instead of wealth inequality, then the cost of living would be 2-4 times lower than it was, and 4-16 times lower than it is.
There's an expression: dirty hands clean money. By that principle, we see that all profit comes at a cost to others doing the work.
And by extension, that all power takes from some to give to others.
There's a movie called August set in 2001 about the struggle to stay afloat during the collapse, starring Josh Hartnett:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470679/
The Dot Bomb never ended. If we want to escape it, we have to meditate on letting go of ego-based goals and outsmarting the systems of control that still perpetuate it.