Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.
Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business
Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day.
The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.
You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term.
Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.
Thing is that it took 10-15 years for the stocks of these companies to reach the same marketcap again.
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.
There also were companies like Sun and Cisco who had real, roaring business and lots of revenue that depended on loose start-up purse-strings, and VC exuberance...
Sun and Cisco both survived the .com bust, but were never the same, nor did theu ever reach their high-water marks again. They were shovel-sellers, much like Amazon and Nvidia in 2025.
For sure but unlike then we are in a very different buying environment. Investors are more discerning even though folks here would like tot think differently. Cisco had something at peak like a 179x pe. That is a vastly different world than what we see Nvidia at today. I am not saying it cannot fail or collapse but to say this feels like the .com bubble is wrong.
Or yahoo- they were the premier sellers of ad space online (like google today) and made a lot of money from over-funded tech companies overpaying for online advertising during the boom years.