[deckard1]

I mean. Yes and no. Someone doing some CRUD apps at some car insurance firm just to put dinner on the table is completely fine.

But then you have Theranos and WeWork and all of that late '90s dot-com crap. Most of those companies had nothing to do with tech, but still raked in lots of VC money hoping to sucker people into purchasing their worthless stock after their inflated IPOs.

Of course, it has to be mentioned that the line between fraud and value gets incredibly fuzzy in tech. So much tech is "solutionized" into products that solve problems that are nonsense to begin with. Everyone believes they need cloud-this, or managed K8S, or auto-scaling whatever. The whole industry looks like a fraud at times. Especially enterprise marketing and sales. IBM, Oracle, and others have made a racket on this. And yes they have actual products with actual features, what they are selling are dreams and fairy tales. Look closely at crypto and you'll see the same cottage industry around it today. I mean, what is NFT other than credit default swaps (CDS) for the art market? It's abstracted ownership ("ownership" with a huge asterisk next to it). You even have initial coin offerings (ICO). Every thing from the dot-com and 2008 financial engineering crisis have all been replicated in crypto.

[alisonkisk]

Dot-com bubble was real companies with inflated valuations from speculators and experimental business models that weren't all solvent.

Theranos was trying to make and sell a real product but the product didn't work so they lied and cheated to cover that up because they had nothing else to offer.

Every business is dreams and fairytales because extra sizzle gets more customers

It's different from cryptocurrencies which are pure scam plays from the start.