[wongarsu]

And a lot of the products that ended up mattering were founded in the decade after the dot com bubble: Facebook 2004, Youtube 2005, Twitter 2006, Spotify 2006, Whatsapp 2009, etc.

A hype bubble is great to pump money into experimentation and infrastructure, but the real fruits of that typically come later when everything had a chance to mature.

A similar thing happened with computer vision and CNNs. There was a big hype when "detect if there's an eagle in this image" turned from a multi-year research project to something your intern could code up on the weekend. But most of the useful/profitable industry applications only happened later when the dust was settled and the technology matured.