alt Hacker NewsI was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding.
I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.
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I was a teenager around the dot-com and to this day I feel an idealized sense of longing for participation in the exciting times of the dot-coms. You guys got to enjoy the blazing innovation of the new internet, so full of endless possibilities. Tough luck on your bubble popping moment though.
It's definitely looking like we've passed the peak of the S-curve here.
But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.
For a time.
But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....