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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).

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

> not novel so it could be copied

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