Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dadoomer 1050 days ago
According to the article 38% see a correction in the near-ish future.

Also,

> Unlike during the dot-com bubble of the 2000s, AI isn’t entirely based on speculation.

I'd say the dot-com bubble was backed by a revolutionary product: the Internet. That doesn't change that expectations were too high.

1 comments

Were expectations too high?

Some of the companies involved are now worth trillions.

Amazon, okay, but who else? Nearly all of the big .com-era startups (and major non-startup beneficiaries, like Sun) are _gone_. Yahoo somehow still exists, I suppose.

I suppose you could argue Google, but it's an odd one; it was right at the tail end, and was really only taking off as everything else was collapsing

I would argue Google because the dot-com bubble did not burst till 2000, and Google was founded in 1998.

Also, Netflix was founded Sep 1997. Also, Paypal, founded Oct 1999. Also, Ebay, founded 1995, [del: though Ebay and Paypal together today are worth only 23.8 billion dollars. :del]

I think a lot of the money made by founders and angel investors during the dot-com era was made by selling a startup to an established company for 100s of millions of dollars, which is pretty good money since it often took only took 5 years to go from the founding event to such an exit, but I cannot think of an easy way to get a list of such exits.

ADDED. In writing the above, I assumed Paypal was still part of Ebay. In reality they are separate companies again with market caps of 23.8 and 84.59 billion dollars.

... Huh, never knew Netflix was that old. That's less than a year after DVDs were released!

Interestingly, Netflix has its origins in a... more typical dot-com-era story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Software

You think the owners of webvan are pissed when they see how Instacart became so huge?

They were just too early I reckon. I wonder what we're "too early" for today.

Probably the same with AI, the short term hype cycle being too early for the vast majority of companies.