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Dr. Koop and The Bubble

dcurt.is

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Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#21

Post by JVIDEL »

adventureful wrote: post #16
JVIDEL wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs had just returned to AAPL and was cleaning up the mess left by Sculley and Amelio And no he wasn't taken seriously at all, he was still remembered as the guy who created the abysmal AppleIII, botched the Mac and then got fired from his own company. In fact no VCs invested in his second company NeXT, only himself, Ross Perot and Canon did. That company had to leave hardware altogether and was bought by AAPL becau…

I disagree. There's a difference between valuing NeXT as a business and valuing Steve Jobs as a visionary or creative genius. Investors didn't believe in the business prospects of NeXT, but Jobs was still very highly regarded by the valley.

NeXT wasn't a terrible business and it had many of the same ideas that AAPL uses today, like top-of-the-line industrial design.

Do you even realize there were 5 years between Jobs arrival at AAPL and the iPod right? 3+ years if we count the time it took the iPod to become a true sensation. Add to that 11 years since he had been kicked out from AAPL.

You seem to believe that Jobs was always in the limelight, when the truth is there was a time nobody believed in him, and thus nobody would invest in his new company not so much because of the business model but because he was in charge.

NeXT actually sold for almost $500 million, hardly a complete failure, and yet when he was back at AAPL nobody believed it would make a difference.

He was booed on stage while announcing the deal with Microsoft, how is that being "highly regarded"?

Also consider that when Sculley fired Jobs AAPL stock went up dramatically, not down.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#22

Post by muzz »

adventureful wrote: post #13
dm8 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> CEO wouldn't take Bill Gates' call because CommerceOne was the future and Microsoft was the past. Were you referring to CommerceOne CEO? Out of curiosity, how was AAPL doing those days? Was Jobs taken seriously by Silicon Valley during those days?

Jobs was absolutely taken seriously by Silicon Valley at that time. There was a period, from when he left Apple, through the NeXT days, that Silicon Valley seemed to understand that he had begun to grow up / mature as a leader. When he first left Apple he was a creative pariah, and many of his peers thought he was a dangerous leader; by the time he joined Apple again, that view had faded almost completely. There were…

I beg to differ.

At that time Apple was selling the iMac, remember this was years before the original iPod.

The running joke amongst VCs that were funding companies like Google, VMWare, and Salesforce.com was that Apple was "selling colored plastic"

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#23

Post by muzz »

earino wrote: post #5

WebVan was great too. Some pretty impressive hubris.

I'm always amazed at the immediate discounting that is given to WebVan. They had a long-term vision that will eventually be realized by some other company or companies-- to have a van come regularly to your home, not only to deliver things (like groceries, but also consumer goods, electronics, etc) but also to pick things up while they are there-- your drycleaning, movie rental returns, film rolls to be processed (it was 1999), etc. The long-term goal was essentially a combination of Amazon, Netflix, FedEx, and lots of other companies.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#24

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

muzz wrote: post #23
earino wrote: post #5

WebVan was great too. Some pretty impressive hubris.

I'm always amazed at the immediate discounting that is given to WebVan. They had a long-term vision that will eventually be realized by some other company or companies-- to have a van come regularly to your home, not only to deliver things (like groceries, but also consumer goods, electronics, etc) but also to pick things up while they are there-- your drycleaning, movie rental returns, film rolls to be processed (it…

Self driving cars.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#26

Post by jt2190 »

muzz wrote: post #23
earino wrote: post #5

WebVan was great too. Some pretty impressive hubris.

I'm always amazed at the immediate discounting that is given to WebVan. They had a long-term vision that will eventually be realized by some other company or companies-- to have a van come regularly to your home, not only to deliver things (like groceries, but also consumer goods, electronics, etc) but also to pick things up while they are there-- your drycleaning, movie rental returns, film rolls to be processed (it…

I remember coming up with an idea for home grocery delivery using the internet to place orders. (This was in 1995 or 1996 I think... before I'd heard of WebVan) Ten minutes of scribbling on an envelope convinced me that the idea could not be profitable, except perhaps for a niche market that was already well served.

When WebVan arrived, I was curious to see how they'd overcome the obstacles. They didn't.

No doubt someday, someone will make all of their "vision" happen, but it takes a lot more than vision to make a viable business.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#27

Post by qdog »

I worked in Austin, Tx in late 1999 right across from the Dr. Koop building. Even at the time it was amazing how much money they were spending/had spent on things like that. I'm not sure they even fully moved in after it was built, or if it imploded first.

Funny thing, I worked at a company that served the likes of ING and some other broker-dealers at the time, and was about break-even on that business. However, the lure of all the easy internet money was a siren's call, luring the founder to try and grow into a 'portal' to attract eyeballs. That didn't work out so well, however we were using Linux, Apache, Perl and only some pdf processing software required MSFT at the time, and a free copy of Sybase (no, I don't know why that was our db of choice, and it crashed as it was the 'free' version, not fun being the new guy/last man standing trying to recover the db on live servers). Even at the time, it was hard to figure out how Dr. Koop, Pets.com, Vignette etc. were ever going to make the money their IPO's drew.

At the time, Amazon was also a questionable affair, but they managed to make it, so it's not all hopeless. Some of the companies will make it, but so far my ability to pick the winners is pretty slim.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#28

Post by georgieporgie »

dm8 wrote: post #11
adventureful wrote: post #8

I remember CommerceOne being worth $20 billion, and having a gazillion dollar burn rate (they lost $3.7 billion over 10 years from 1994 to 2004). There was a famous story at the time that the CEO wouldn't take Bill Gates' call because CommerceOne was the future and Microsoft was the past. Internet Capital Group was another similarly insane story, once worth $60 billion. VA Linux IPO'd at a valuation of $7 billion if…

>> CEO wouldn't take Bill Gates' call because CommerceOne was the future and Microsoft was the past. Were you referring to CommerceOne CEO? Out of curiosity, how was AAPL doing those days? Was Jobs taken seriously by Silicon Valley during those days?

My recollection of Apple leading up to and immediately following the introduction of the iMac and OS X, was that everyone in the press was beating the drum of impending doom. I recall a coworker telling me that her financial adviser had recommended she buy Apple, and I thought she was nuts. Not that I had a shred of wisdom at the time, but I'm pretty sure a good portion of the public would have sided with me (hence the extremely low share prices).

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#29

Post by georgieporgie »

dm8 wrote: post #2

Wow. I was too young when bubble started and all I remember is the talk that "Internet is going to change the world". But if companies like the one mentioned went public then I must imagine how bad situation might be at that time. Currently, companies that are going public have some solid revenue numbers and are in business for a while.

True, but taking Facebook as an example, it's IPO'd with a 100:1 P/E ratio. It would take 100 years at current earnings in order to pay for its current value. So, the question is: will they double revenue for enough consecutive years to bring that P/E ratio down? If they manage it, it will be a very impressive feat.

(for the record, I'm not saying it's a bubble, and I'm not necessarily saying FB is overvalued. I admit that they have a lot of bright people and are probably the best-poised company right now to develop completely innovative revenue streams)

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#30

Post by georgieporgie »

Near the peak of the bubble, I was at the gym in Phoenix, AZ. Two guys on the stationary bikes in front of me were talking. "I just bought AOL at $X today." There was a look of resigned exasperation between them over how high the buy-in was. "But hey, you know, it can only go up from here, right?"

That was about the time I started moving my 401k into bonds for awhile. :-)

Incidentally, for the younger folks, one of the interesting things about the Dot Com bubble was that it coincided with mass interest in online trading. I have no idea what the numbers are regarding the number of active individual traders now versus then, but at the time you'd go to a party and overhear tons of people self-identifying as day traders. Living through that taught me that I really don't know enough about finance to pick individual stocks, and since then I've left my money in mutual funds, index funds, and now an entirely managed Vanguard account.

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