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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.

Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.

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> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business

Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day.

The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.

You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term.

Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.

My point in listing survivors was simply to make the point that while there were plenty of doomed businesses, there were also many giants which were big at the time and could be told apart by looking at their fundamentals — they had real people paying them money for tangible things at a price which could be profitable. Amazon famously reported low numbers due to reinvestment but they were profitable in most business segments a few years after entering, which was quite different from the “lose money on every sale, make it up on volume” plays many dotcoms made.

How does that refute the statement you quoted? I said the vast majority of companies during the bubble had no business, were run on hype dollars and had insane P/E ratios. That supports a handful of companies making it through the bloodbath, but also a cherry picked examples that neither refutes my claim or supports yours.

You said “largely” and I think that’s painting with too broad a brush. The dotcom world included a bunch of companies which are still around (or were acquired later after surviving the collapse), and it wasn’t hard to tell who those were even at the time. There was a lot of lazy boosterism and criticism painting the whole field as the same, and that was a disservice to readers who could’ve used a more thoughtful triage approach. That’s especially the case for companies like Kozmo which actually had a popular idea and had the potential to be profitable (they were in most urban markets) but made the mistake of expanding too quickly or taking on more debt than they could service.

You’re sidestepping the core point. Of course some companies had fundamentals, even Kozmo had product market fit in a narrow sense. But the broader ecosystem was bloated with capital chasing flimsy ideas, and most dot-coms had no viable path to profit. That’s not “too broad a brush”, it’s backed by the collapse itself.

Kozmo is a great case study: decent demand, terrible unit economics, and zero pricing power. They didn’t just scale too fast, they scaled a structurally unprofitable model. There was no markup, thin margins, and they held inventory without enough throughput.

Many of these companies may fail but it’s a much different environment and the path to profitability is moving a lot quicker.

Thing is that it took 10-15 years for the stocks of these companies to reach the same marketcap again.

That’s what people predicted bit, for example, on Amazon’s case it was less than 3 years because they just kept posting solid numbers. The thing which all of those companies have in common is that they stood out from the Pets.com types in having profitable revenue - they didn’t need a miracle to be profitable, only for customers to keep buying.

> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.

There also were companies like Sun and Cisco who had real, roaring business and lots of revenue that depended on loose start-up purse-strings, and VC exuberance...

Sun and Cisco both survived the .com bust, but were never the same, nor did theu ever reach their high-water marks again. They were shovel-sellers, much like Amazon and Nvidia in 2025.

Or yahoo- they were the premier sellers of ad space online (like google today) and made a lot of money from over-funded tech companies overpaying for online advertising during the boom years.

For sure but unlike then we are in a very different buying environment. Investors are more discerning even though folks here would like tot think differently. Cisco had something at peak like a 179x pe. That is a vastly different world than what we see Nvidia at today. I am not saying it cannot fail or collapse but to say this feels like the .com bubble is wrong.

>Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.

I'm an attorney that got pitched the leading legal AI service and it was nothing but junk... so I'm not sure why you think that's different from what's going on right now.

Was the leading legal AI service Harvey.ai by any chance? I feel like big VC money goes to solving legal analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of wins with document drafting/templating.

Briefpoint.ai, casely.ai, eve.legal etc. I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.

It was Vincent.

> I feel like big VC money goes to solving legal analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of wins with document drafting/templating.

What do you mean "wins?" Like motions won with AI drafted papers? I'm skeptical.

>I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.

I'd be concerned about malpractice, personally. The case reviews I've seen from Vincent (which is ChatGPT + the entire federal docket) are shocking in how facially wrong they can be. It's one thing for an attorney to use ChatGPT when they do know the law and issues (hasn't seemed to help the various different partners getting sanctioned for filing AI drafted briefs) but to leave the filtering to a paralegal? That's insane, imo.

Never heard Vincent to be leading in the legal space but I know vlex is more popular outside of the US so perhaps that’s why.

I am not sure why you would think your single anecdote is defensible or evidence to prove much. My perspective is valuations that are going on right now don’t have multiples that are that wild especially if we aren’t compare it to the com bubble.

>I am not sure why you would think your single anecdote is defensible or evidence to prove much.

Evidence? Prove? What are you talking about. This is just a discussion between people, not some courtroom melodrama you are making it out to be.

>My perspective is valuations that are going on right now don’t have multiples that are that wild especially if we aren’t compare it to the com bubble.

Okay, I could be equally rude to you, but I wont.

I responded in the exact same format as yourself and adding my additional thoughts. If that counts a being rude then were you being rude? I don’t believe in the US market Vincent is considered the best tool. That said I don’t believe a lot of the tools in the legal space that try to do everything are that powerful and the ones on my lens that are going well have focused on specific domains and problems. Even Harvey tried to do too much from the start.

As for valuations, when looking at current VC multiples and equity markets, I don’t see the same bubble from a qualitative perspective. Absolutely there is over hype coming from CEOs in public markets but there is a lot of value being driven. I don’t believe the giants are going to do well, maybe the infrastructure plays will but I think we will see a carve out of a new generation of companies driving the change. Unlike ‘99, I am seeing a lot more startups and products with closer to the ground roadmaps to profitability. In 99 so many were running off of hopes and dreams.

If you would actually like to converse I would love to see your perspective but if all you can be is mad please please don’t respond. Nobody is having a courtroom drama other than what’s playing out in your head.

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