[marcus0x62]

It was pretty bad until ‘03, or so, but there were profitable businesses that people flocked to. I worked for a small ISP at the time (the entire bubble/post bubble era) and we bought a lot of equipment and sometimes customer bases off of failed, venture-backed providers.

As an aside, I remember two instances that made me think this is a bubble:

1) We were having some HVAC work done at our data center, and one of the contractors kept asking if I had any “hot” stock tips and shared some he had heard previously about some idiotic .com startup (I don’t remember the exact company, but it was near pets.com levels of stupid.)

2) As a small company that didn’t pay particularly well, we went through a bunch of sales reps, and usually hired people with no telecom/ISP sales experience. One day, we hired two of the best reps from Worldcom. I asked them why they came to work for us and they said they felt like Worldcom was going to implode due to all the fraud going on: sales reps switching their customers between the MCI and Worldcom billing systems every month (which, apparently would trigger a new commission payment) and a coworker of theirs who just suddenly started getting paid $20k per month in commissions, despite not having sold anything. They said the guy tried for months to do the right thing and return the money, but after being told again and again the payments were correct said screw it, bought a sports car and started dating a stripper.

My biggest investing regret is not trading on these realizations — not Worldcom specifically, but the market as a whole. It was like a lightbulb went off about how crazy the whole industry was about six months before the bottom fell out, but I didn’t act on that knowledge at all.