Dr. Koop and The Bubble • Hacker News Board

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#41

Post by hkarthik » Fri, May 25, 2012, 2:23 PM UTC

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…

>> Nortel and Lucent were worth $200 some odd billion, around the time Cisco punched up to $600 billion.

This is really good to know. Nortel has a pretty significant presence here in Dallas, TX and I remember hearing stories that they were handing out brand new Porsches to new hires that signed on with them in the 90s. I never understood how much money it would take to see that kind of excess, but now I know.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#42

Post by JVIDEL » Fri, May 25, 2012, 3:30 PM UTC

adventureful wrote: post #33

JVIDEL wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

NeXT was a terrible business, it never turned a profit, and bled money endlessly. The products were often good, but they were extremely expensive and were never quite matched properly to a market. NeXT was such a terrible business, Jobs was nearly at a point of having to shut it down when Apple purchased it because it couldn't stand on its own as a hardware company any longer. The reason VC never touched NeXT was the…

Do you realize how absurd and contradictory you are being right now? NeXT was an actual company and didn't get any funding while complete hacks like the one in the article got millions and didn't even have a product.

A NeXT was used by TimBL to create the Web! Carmack used one to code DOOM, do you even understand how prestigious this is?

And don't talk about NeXT as if Jobs was just an employee, it was HIS company, he started it practically alone with money off his own pocket.

100 millions=insane? AAPL was a 4 billion company, and NeXT was full of former AAPL employees, how is 100 million insane?

Right now you have startups with no strategy getting more funding and higher valuations than NeXT because the founder is from Facebook or Google.

Again, when Jobs was fired he had already lost all momentum, where have you seen a public company whose shares go up after firing a founder? That's how bad Jobs' image in the Valley was.

Re: Dr. Koop and The Bubble

#43

Post by adventureful » Sat, May 26, 2012, 12:16 AM UTC

jroseattle wrote: post #31

Ah, the good old days. It was 1999, we had just moved to Seattle, and all these people I had just met who were in their early 30's were retiring from Microsoft. Not just from MS -- they were retiring . Near the millenium, with the stock sitting at about $120/share, a good friend who had started at MS as a receptionist and moved all the way up to program manager (a rather common title, in those days) decided to call i…

There was a story about a couple from Texas that loaded up with most of their personal wealth on Dell stock near its IPO point. Dell had IPO'd at a particularly low price point (so cheap, $0.05 / share, that you'd still have a 240 fold return today from that first year potentially), so it didn't take much to see huge wealth returned.

So as the stock kept going up, they kept leveraging up higher. They started from a few hundred thousand invested, ended up around $40+ million (Dell was a 1,000 bagger in ten years), but were carrying some insane leverage against it like $12 to $15 million at the peak. Never heard a follow up story, but they claimed they planned to just keep letting it ride and pushing the leverage up to boost returns - they had no concerns about a crash.