

Ask HN: Was there really a dot com bubble? - itry

Wikipedia points out, that at the peak of the dot com bubble, &quot;America&#x27;s 371 publicly traded Internet companies have grown to the point that they are collectively valued at $1.3 trillion&quot;.<p>Thats about as much as the combined value of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook today. So the internet did hold up to its promise.<p>Even if we only look at companies that already existed during the &quot;bubble&quot; - there is a lot of value. Amazon is worth 143 billion. Ebay 64 billion. If we add up all the value of the survivors, maybe we come to the conclusion that there was no bubble?
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tptacek
Your syllogism doesn't work. The dot-com bubble wasn't "the ultimate promise
of the Internet". It was the irrational valuations assigned to a specific set
of unsustainable business models popularized in the late 90s, and driven by
pre-profit and often pre-revenue companies going directly to the public market
for liquidity.

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mohammadmansur
Didn't you just black-hole the fourteen years in between when comparing
valuations? :)

Also, even if we go along with your line of reasoning and the net worth of the
survivors pretty much equals the net worth of all the internet companies in
2000, that still means that almost 99% of the internet companies were
worthless and all the venture capital poured therein lost. Still sounds very
much like a bubble, no?

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zwiteof
> If we add up all the value of the survivors, maybe we come to the conclusion
> that there was no bubble?

Factoring in inflation would that still be true? Do the internet companies
make up a significant percentage of the stock market like they did in 2000? Is
this comparison even valid since I'd expect the tech/internet sector to have
grown significantly as the internet has matured since 2000?

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kohanz
I would argue that most of the value of those companies was created post-
bubble.

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brudgers
Apple is not an internet based company. Facebook's stock is privately held for
the most part. Half of Google's publicly held stock is non-voting. The
founder's class B shares carry 10 votes apiece.

