Do you think we're in a bubble and it'll burst?
Of course, do you not?
Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#12fuckedcompany.com on 6-hour refresh.
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#13The highways were empty and I spent my time playing Vampire LARP in downtown Palo Alto , or talking with my friends about larping. There were no jobs anywhere and I almost moved out of state. However, I decided to stay and take the consequences. It worked out for me, but I occasionally see some people I knew from back in the day. They never bounced back.
How much could you get a liquidated Aeron chair for?
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#14Before: Mt. View cinemas with pre movie recruiting ads with sign on offers of a new car.
After: Ads for used routers and switches and office furniture.
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#15The Valley hit the floor so fast that the auction company selling off what was left of our startup just combined the auction with that of another startup in the same building that hit the floor at the same time.
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#16The highways were empty and I spent my time playing Vampire LARP in downtown Palo Alto , or talking with my friends about larping. There were no jobs anywhere and I almost moved out of state. However, I decided to stay and take the consequences. It worked out for me, but I occasionally see some people I knew from back in the day. They never bounced back.
How long did it remain empty? Did real-estate prices crash?
Commercial yes, but housing no. Houses leveled off briefly. It meant that instead of having to make an offer 50% over asking and literally beg in a personal letter to the owners, you could make a 10% over offer and leave it to the agent.
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#17People say there is a bubble, but Marc Andreessen is right that the situation is completely different now. When we started in 1998, our whole startup was on one dialup line, as a T1 was really expensive. We had to take turns downloading files. This was in San Mateo, California, not the middle of nowhere. The sysadmins once put out a request to the developers one time to physically show up and help move all of the servers. Our colo site got mad at us because we packed so many servers in that it overtaxed their air conditioning. Who buys their own servers now?
Now everybody is connected. You really can expect a huge number of normal non-technical people to be able to use your website to do everyday mundane tasks like hail a cab or order food. As Marc points out, all the stupid ideas from the bubble all work now. In 2000, selling pet food online was stupid. Now people buy so much online that physical retail businesses that sell generic stuff like pet food are going out of business.
Not sure if I can can communicate how utterly strange the internet was to most people in 1998. There had never been anything like it. People knew it would change everything, and they were right. It just needed a decade and a half for everyone to get network, get a client machine they liked (iPhone), and learn how to use it. I think Marc is right: this is the deployment phase of the technology. I do not think there will ever be another internet bubble. The next bubble will be in some new technology that does not work yet, like biotech or self-driving cars.
Or, maybe people are now so well-informed and information is in such a tight feedback loop that there will never be that kind of bubble ever again. Bubbles come from ignorance and a slow feedback loop. People forget how hard it was to find information in the past: you literally had to know where to physically go to get it. Now some dude in rural China can find out more about the meeting schedule of subcommittees the North Dakota legislature next week while sitting on the toilet than most people in North Dakota could in 1995 without at the very least making a bunch of phone calls all the time or living in Bismarck and going to the capital ever day: http://www.legis.nd.gov/ I was so confident of that sentence that I guessed that to be true and only searched for the site after writing that sentence: yup, there's an app for that.
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#18By 2000 everyone knew there was going to be a big correction. Few accurately imagined how big. It was like going to the doctors because you knew something was 'a little off' and finding out that you were going to die in three months. Then talking to all your friends and realizing that everyone you knew had the same disease.
Initially many thought it would be similar to the early 90s recession. I.E. A few layoffs with everyone getting hired back again two years later. It wasn't until 2002 that people realized that springtime wasnt coming back.
It wasnt just places like pets.com that crashed. You had every single non-tech company simultaneously scaling back IT initiatives. At the time there was still a large cohort of management types who considered the Internet more of a fad than a new paradigm. These types took full advantage of the shifting winds to cut deeply into anything tech related. This broad overcorrection did a massive amount of damage to the industry.
You can still see the impact crater. Remember the big talent shortages during 2008-2012? Thats because you no longer had a cohort of mid career professionals to draw from. Only the thin number of people who survived the collapse and a bunch of novices who were just getting started. Everyone was missing that valuable group of mid career 8-12 years of experience etc... Basically a generation of careers strangled. Which is why you'll often see no sympathy for the 'talent shortage' complaint. Five years after cutting everything and leaving people to starve you have the same cohort of managers demanding to know "where are all the people with five years of recent experience"
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#19Aftermath
- 25% commercial real-estate unoccupancy rate in Santa Clara area.
- many companies optimistically bought campuses and signed long-term leases at dot-com fervor rates.
- less traffic.
- near collapse of many luxury and home-improvement retailers.
- homeowners stuck in teaser variable rate mortgages and then unemployed. (smart ones flipped to fixed rate or sold just before the housing market collapsed.)
- employee stock options worthless (my mom avoided the downturn by flipping stocks and selling real estate at the top before that bubble burst).
- dirt-cheap repo computers, furniture and fixture sales.
Before
- people making $500k/yr and driving a Jag to work.
- parking lot "showroom" full of hyper and supercars at eBay and so on.
- flipping house upgrades on variable rate mortgages.
- big consultancies billing out $1500+/hour; golf, booze, escorts/hookers and weed/cocaine as client entertainment, $100 meals every day; $300k xmas party alcohol tab.
- construction boom, especially parking structures.
Later
- Google first admin and family retired already, work to stay busy.
- Investors actually doing due-diligence of timing, team, business model, risk and potential holistically.
- Sufficient commercial real estate inventory and infrastructure.
Re: Ask HN: What was it like when dot-com bubble collapsed during 2000-2002?
#20fuckedcompany.com on 6-hour refresh.
OMG, I remember that.
Layoffs, bankruptcies, closures and associated drama.