The dot-com was a bubble because investors pulled money and belief at the first sign of trouble.
The landscape has changed dramatically now. Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
We also have more automatic, retail and foreign money flowing into the market. Buy the dip is a phenomenon that didn't exist at the scale it is now.
Pre-2015 if Big Money pulled out, the market was guaranteed to fail, but now retailers sometimes have longer views and belief (on people like Musk, Altman) than institutions and they continue to prop it.
So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now. Yes, history repeats, but doesn't with the exact time or price points
dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with current AI.
Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.
Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of investors rallying behind the Internet.
"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?
Also there are no early IPOs. Very few people can buy stocks in these companies which changes the dynamics significantly. Note sure what's the point of talking about the stock market this much when for almost everyone the only way to get any exposureis through Nvidia or other hardware companies and maybe MS/Google/AWS.
> Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
Well... yes and no. 2021 wasn't that long ago.
> So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now
The stock market and other financial stuff is of course different. The fundamental trend not necessarily though. It took awhile for anyone to figure out how to directly build a highly profitable internet based business back then for AI it seems more or less the same so far.
It is foolish to compare to the dot com boom and bust. At least when that bubble burst we still had the global broadband internet that it built. When this bubble bursts, we'll have next to nothing to show for it.
Nothing except massive data centers full of GPU compute resources paid for by VC money. Wait, that's actually pretty similar...
I'm starting to think that making a bunch of tech companies the most valuable companies on Earth, and tying their value to everyone's ability to retire so the number must always go up was perhaps not the wisest thing to have done.
They could close shop and you could print the money and give to the retirements fonds and everyone would be better off. Maybe Apple would be missed.
gpus go obsolete faster than fiber backbone equipment
We have AI, a marvel that might change the arc of humanity and an epoch in our timeline. Fire, wheel etc. and AI.
I'll choose the wheel over using a country's worth of electricity to parrot unusable AI slop to gullible fools.
Is AI not useful to you? I've sped up my SWE work significantly (10x). Not sure why the cynicism.
We will have a mountain of GPUs!
OP didn't reference the dot-com bubble though...
> Investors and VCs have learnt
lol. Investors and VCs have no idea what they're doing
lol is a coping mechanism for the poor. If you really think top VCs / investors haven't learnt the long-term importance of staying the course, then you know nothing about the industry and mostly being influenced by popular social media posts shitting on the investor class.
There is a reason Anthropic/OpenAI and many startups are given much much longer ropes to be profitable than in the 2000 era when VCs pulled the rug the first opportunity of trouble
The thing that was most disillusioning for me here was SVB -- failure to apply basic principles of banking (i.e. they never really had a plan for central bank interest rates to change more than +-1%). Not just that the VC types running a bank weren't able to do so, but that such a large number of tech companies held all their cash on hand in a bank account (and didn't deposit anything in another bank, or a money-market fund/t-bills).
If VCs knew what they were doing, they'd have real jobs
Allocating capital might be the "realest" job in capital...ism.
There are always shitty 20% operators in every industry. They won't make money and get weeded out.
Delusional to apply this to top operators (and at the same breath complain about Rich getting Richer)
I have yet to be pleasantly surprised by the alleged collective wisdom of Wallstreet. I would hope that you are right, and that our corporate masters are smarter than I give them credit for, but I'm not going to hold my breath