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Comment by meta_ai_x | Hacker News Reader

The dot-com was a bubble because investors pulled money and belief at the first sign of trouble.

The landscape has changed dramatically now. Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.

We also have more automatic, retail and foreign money flowing into the market. Buy the dip is a phenomenon that didn't exist at the scale it is now.

Pre-2015 if Big Money pulled out, the market was guaranteed to fail, but now retailers sometimes have longer views and belief (on people like Musk, Altman) than institutions and they continue to prop it.

So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now. Yes, history repeats, but doesn't with the exact time or price points

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Also there are no early IPOs. Very few people can buy stocks in these companies which changes the dynamics significantly. Note sure what's the point of talking about the stock market this much when for almost everyone the only way to get any exposureis through Nvidia or other hardware companies and maybe MS/Google/AWS.

> Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.

Well... yes and no. 2021 wasn't that long ago.

> So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now

The stock market and other financial stuff is of course different. The fundamental trend not necessarily though. It took awhile for anyone to figure out how to directly build a highly profitable internet based business back then for AI it seems more or less the same so far.

dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with current AI.

Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.

Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of investors rallying behind the Internet.

"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?

And if you'd invested in Cisco then, it would have gone very badly for you. It was _wildly_ overvalued; at peak it had a P/E ratio of ~200 (even Nvidia's only about 50).

> not novel so it could be copied

AI Agents can't be copied in a race to the bottom market to resell inference compute?

how so? Many internet companies that went bust like Webvan and Pets.com have successful equivalents in Instacart and Chewy?

I'm pretty sure many internet companies would be given a longer rope to survive now. E.g OpenAI and Anthropic will probably take years to get profitable but investors are OK with it

> Investors and VCs have learnt

lol. Investors and VCs have no idea what they're doing

lol is a coping mechanism for the poor. If you really think top VCs / investors haven't learnt the long-term importance of staying the course, then you know nothing about the industry and mostly being influenced by popular social media posts shitting on the investor class.

There is a reason Anthropic/OpenAI and many startups are given much much longer ropes to be profitable than in the 2000 era when VCs pulled the rug the first opportunity of trouble

If VCs knew what they were doing, they'd have real jobs

There are always shitty 20% operators in every industry. They won't make money and get weeded out.

Delusional to apply this to top operators (and at the same breath complain about Rich getting Richer)

I have yet to be pleasantly surprised by the alleged collective wisdom of Wallstreet. I would hope that you are right, and that our corporate masters are smarter than I give them credit for, but I'm not going to hold my breath

Allocating capital might be the "realest" job in capital...ism.

The thing that was most disillusioning for me here was SVB -- failure to apply basic principles of banking (i.e. they never really had a plan for central bank interest rates to change more than +-1%). Not just that the VC types running a bank weren't able to do so, but that such a large number of tech companies held all their cash on hand in a bank account (and didn't deposit anything in another bank, or a money-market fund/t-bills).

It is foolish to compare to the dot com boom and bust. At least when that bubble burst we still had the global broadband internet that it built. When this bubble bursts, we'll have next to nothing to show for it.

We will have a mountain of GPUs!

Nothing except massive data centers full of GPU compute resources paid for by VC money. Wait, that's actually pretty similar...

gpus go obsolete faster than fiber backbone equipment

Do they? I figured each speed increase requires new optical equipment, but I guess I was just making assumptions.

I'm starting to think that making a bunch of tech companies the most valuable companies on Earth, and tying their value to everyone's ability to retire so the number must always go up was perhaps not the wisest thing to have done.

They could close shop and you could print the money and give to the retirements fonds and everyone would be better off. Maybe Apple would be missed.

We have AI, a marvel that might change the arc of humanity and an epoch in our timeline. Fire, wheel etc. and AI.

I'll choose the wheel over using a country's worth of electricity to parrot unusable AI slop to gullible fools.

Is AI not useful to you? I've sped up my SWE work significantly (10x). Not sure why the cynicism.

If you're just talking about SWE work, thats only one segment of an economy and is the "virtual world". But humans have to live in the real world.

I believe the true revolution is going to be when AI can start living / interacting with the physical world. Driverless cars might be the start here.

OP didn't reference the dot-com bubble though...

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