Five Years After The Bubble
Posted by harrisj Fri, 15 Apr 2005 20:14:07 GMT
I completely missed the 5-year anniversary of when the tech-boom bubble started to go south. Looking back, we all knew that the bubble would eventually burst, but a lot of people lost their shirts anyway hoping to get out at the optimum time (essentially like surfing a cresting wave). For those of you who may not have experience the wave of euphoria and techno-optimism that filled those days, visiting Om Malik's compendium of links to reminiscences is a good start. Here's a good quote from Five Years After The Bubble:
Still, it was fun. The parties on the roof top of The Industry Standard, the Red Herring conferences, and of course the launch parties. Ahh.. the parties. Five years later, I realize that I lived through one of the most fantastic bubbles in the history of man. Enough, to turn any sane journalist cynical, an occupational hazard when you write about technology, its possibilities and of course its life changing potential. I worried that I was becoming too cynical and losing my love for the biz I love: technology.Yes, it all seems so silly now. Working at an unglamorous startup (so unglamorous we've actually been making money!) here in New York, I wasn't really making the rounds from party to party like people did in San Francisco. But the stories would get out and be reported breathless of course in Wired and other places, so I read about it: the $5 million bashes, the super bowl ads, the hot bands flown in for private gigs while nerds enjoyed their brief limelight. We all felt so cool, nerds were running the show, and we were going to change everything (hopefully in a manner as badass as the first Matrix movie too). But, it was really just an elaborate con in some sense, since old media still got the last laugh. In effect, the whole dot-com boom could be written up as a huge transfer of wealth from the computer industry to the media industry (which is why the AOL-TimeWarner merger was so misguided). It's really hard to avoid the inevitable metaphorical comparison to the Titanic, but I'm going to spare you that at least. I do remember hearing about one party that really confirmed to me that the bubble had taken on a crazy life of its own. There was a startup from SF advertising everywhere here in New York called Modo that was going to market electronic entertainment guides for the hip tech-savvy crowd. If you've seen Vindigo for the Palm, the concept should be recognizable. But, instead of operating on an existing device like cell phones or Palms, they wanted to sell a $99 device at high-end stores like DKNY, Virgin, etc. in an attempt to woo fashionistas and the difficult hipster market to tech (usually a fruitless effort). Anyway, to cut a long story short, by the time they reached their launch party, the company had already burned through $40 million in Venture Capital ($20 million gone to advertising) and gone out of business. And so, their launch party became a wake. Unbelievable, but that's pretty much how it happened in many places, and I am thankful we managed to ride out the Internet crash in one piece ourselves (more on that later).
