
What were you doing during the first dot boom? - davidw
Just curious what other people were doing pre-2001, besides founding Viaweb.
======
brk
I was all in up in it. Working for a company that eventually got acquired by
Lucent. Through the rise and fall of the stock market at the time I was
selling my options and investing the money in other things while most of my
friends/coworkers were tracking their paper worth.

In the end, I pulled 7 figures from my options while most people I knew just
sat there and let the world happen to them and were left with nothing the day
Lucent dropped from about $70 to $50 then kept falling.

The morale: don't be greedy and don't be afraid to exercise some of your stock
and diversify should you find yourself in a scenario where your options become
worth something.

I also started a company of my own through those years and had a couple of
other side interests going on. All in all it was a fun time. I recall spotting
some trends, like Fore Systems oscillating between $8 and $10 a share for a
while. I would buy 1 or 2 thousand shares on margin, then sell a few days
later and cash the check. The stock market at the time was like a giant ATM if
you knew how to play it and didn't get too greedy (there's that theme again).

~~~
mattmaroon
"The stock market at the time was like a giant ATM if you knew how to play it
and didn't get too greedy"

Lol. I upvoted before I saw that. You think that because you got lucky. Read
Fooled by Randomness.

~~~
brk
My wife and I both have better than average financial backgrounds. She has a
couple of finance-related degrees, and has worked as a financial analyst for
many years (since a bit before the dot com times). I also have working
knowledge of financial operations. So while there was some luck involved, it
was certainly not "fooled by randomness".

~~~
mattmaroon
Read the book. Most financial professionals (and 100% of people who believe
timing the market was ever possible) are simply fooled by randomness.

~~~
brk
I never believed that "timing the market" was possible so much as I believed
that you can leverage other peoples hype to your advantage. BTW, I also made a
couple of bucks in the hyped real estate fiasco, and then bought a condo on
Lake Winnipesaukee, and then stopped. The difference is that most people over
leverage themselves and keep going for "one more fix". Again, rather than
being greedy in highly unstable markets I chose instead to get in and get out,
in theory I'm leaving money on the table, in reality I'm just taking advantage
of things to my benefit and leaving my "real" investments to a more sane and
logical strategy.

~~~
mattmaroon
All you did was reduce your sample size. That doesn't mean you're any more
profitable than anyone else in terms of EV. For instance, if the market
crashed during the short period in which you were exposed to it, rather than a
little later, you would be hugely negative.

Again, read the book. Really, it's eye-opening.

------
tjr
I was a computer science college student. I thought that the web was a great
way to share information, but that "web applications" were boring compared to
"real computer science" like programming language design and natural language
processing.

In some ways, I regret focusing so much on traditional computer science and
ignoring the web -- I probably could have made significantly more money circa
2000 than I did. But on the other hand, I just read an interview with Don
Knuth in this month's _Communications of the ACM_ , in which Don encouraged
readers to do the work that they personally find interesting, not what they
think others think to be interesting.

I've done some web work since 2000, and that can be fun, but when it gets down
to it, my joy in computing really is found more in language processing than in
web applications. Finding an income-optimizing way to merge the two would be
most grand, I suppose. :-)

~~~
tonystubblebine
I remember having the same opinion. At one point I refused to learn HTML
because I didn't consider it a real language.

------
cperciva
I was finishing my undergraduate degree (end of 2000), computing the
quadrillionth bit of Pi (it's a zero), and laughing when I was cold-called by
VCs who read about me in the new york times and had heard that "distributed
computing" was the latest hot thing.

I'm probably not unique in this respect, but I'm sure there aren't many people
who write to VCs saying "thanks for the offer, but I find doing a D.Phil. at
Oxford University to be far more interesting than getting $5M of funding for
my work".

~~~
staunch
Did you win the Putnam?

If not, please don't brag about turning down VCs so you could attend Oxford.

~~~
cperciva
_Did you win the Putnam?_

I think you know the answer to that question. :-)

EDIT: For the benefit of people who weren't around 387 days ago, staunch is (I
presume) referring to this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079>

~~~
webwright
Wow. I'm wondering if you could take a few more opportunities to mention that
you went to Oxford. At 13. And that you're smarter than everyone else.

If I were you, I'd seriously never link to that thread again. No matter how
blindingly smart you are, you're going to need partners, employees, etc. No
reason to permanently and publicly document your arrogance-- that kind of
stuff (justifiably) scares people off.

You should honestly be humble-- most of the talent and knowledge you've
accumulated probably doesn't have much application in the world of
entrepreneurship. There's a reason you don't see Mensa members rocking the
world of startups.

~~~
cperciva
_Wow. I'm wondering if you could take a few more opportunities to mention that
you went to Oxford. At 13._

I didn't go to Oxford when I was 13, I went to Oxford when I was 19 -- my
first degree (which I started when I was 13) was at Simon Fraser University in
Canada.

But to respond to your main point: I don't go out of my way to mention this,
but if it's relevant -- well, I'm not going to sweep it under the rug either.
If someone asks what I was doing in 2000, I'll tell them; and in the context
of the (first) dot-com bubble and in a forum where VCs are discussed
frequently, I don't think there's anything inappropriate about snickering at
an idiotic VC who cold-called an undergraduate with no business experience
solely on the basis of media reports saying that said undergraduate had done
something in the "hot" area du jour.

 _I'd seriously never link to that thread again._

I only added the link to that thread because without that context anyone who
arrived at news.yc in the past year would have no way to understand the joke.

~~~
webwright
Even if it's relevant, give it some serious thought. There are very few
audiences that are going to respond well to the "I am more competent than 90%
of you", as evidenced by responses that it generated (one of them being one of
the highest ranked single comments in the history of HN).

Sorry for being pissy-- there is a constant barrage of people on HN who say
the equivalent of "Yes, startups are hard for normal people. But I'm really
smart-- it may still be hard, but my chances are waaaaaay better".

That's such a destructive attitude (more for you than for the people who read
it and walk away shaking their head).

------
miguelxt
I was going to 8th grade.

~~~
dmpayton
As was I. Y'know, I didn't even realize there was a bubble until after it had
burst.

I spent my time teaching myself HTML and toying around with Photoshop 6. I
also did an insignificant amount of PHP around 2001 -- mostly tweaking
existing scripts to try and get them to do what I wanted (I used to get
grounded for spending too much time on the computer and slacking at school;
now I get paid a nice salary for "playing on the computer" :).

It was another year or two until I really started programming.

~~~
markbao
Didn't realize that there was a bubble either.

Going into 3rd grade or so, didn't really start programming either,
unfortunately. I think I was just messing around with a copy of Visual Basic 6
I received from a book.

------
icky
I was in high school, basking in the myth that we programmers would simply
pick from among our countless job offers, deigning to work at the cushiest
one, spending all day playing foosball, nerf darts, Quake, spinning around in
our Aeron chairs, drinking free soda, and watching our stock options make us
millionaires while we occasionally sauntered over to the keyboard to peck out
a few (godlike) lines of Perl.

I graduated high school in 2000, and it was a rude awakening.

------
byrneseyeview
Middle school. Followed stocks obsessively. I started buying utilities in
1997, hoping there would be a panic and overreaction to Y2K. I remember
telling someone to sell Cisco in 7th grade (Spring 2000), but other than that
my market timing sucked.

------
mattmaroon
Gambling, working, partying, and going to school, in that order. I then quit
them all in reverse order.

------
ericwan
Going to 9th grade. Didn't know of Paypal, Excite, or even eBay. Yahoo is the
only pre-bubble company I know. Hotmail was not a startup to me, it was a
product of Microsoft.

------
timr
I was working at at a large research institute in Menlo Park (which is located
a stones' throw from Google's first office). My first paycheck there has
almost the same date as the first ($0) Google paycheck that Paul Buchheit
posted to his blog.

(Sigh.)

------
troystribling
I worked for Corvis and watched my paper millions disappear.

------
kaens
I was in high school, in a comp-sci course taught by a very good teacher. We
used C++. I tried very hard to write a chess AI that learned by analyzing its
previous games - I failed miserably, it was fun.

The same teacher taught the "CCNA" class, which was also taught well. I've
pointed it out to him before, but Mr. Nesler, if you're reading this, you're
probably the best teacher I ever had.

I remember discovering slashdot, and getting my "check what the URL looks like
before clicking on it" reflexes. I also remember the "online journal" thing
really starting to get popular.

I remember being fascinated by Java.

------
mixmax
started a dot-com of course...

unfortunately it crashed and burned - but at least i tried.

------
kennyroo
Hiding out at relatively safe Disney.com after escaping Excite@Home just
before the fall.

------
raffi
In 2001 I was in bootcamp. Prior to that I was working for a small music store
chain writing an E-Commerce package. Spent my high school years (pre-2000) as
a system administrator at a local ISP. In 2005 I gave a presentation to a high
school "e-commerce business" class. It was a lot of fun reflecting on the
field when it was so new that even a high school student could be on an even
playing field.

------
hypermatt
Dropped out of high school to work for a dot-bomb, best decision i've ever
made =) Make more money and didn't have to waste all that time in school.

------
mtrimpe
Building an online exchange for technical personnel (plumbers, technicians
etc.) with a designer who nested tables so deep that when I turned on auto-
indent all lines went blank. I bet the poor guy we made it for never earned a
penny from it. It's a good thing I was still cheap back then.

------
scott_s
I started undergrad in Fall '99. Summer of 2000 and Winter of 2000-2001, I had
a summer job at a startup in Reston, VA (think mymp3.com). Great experience,
both technically and professionally. Unlike most startups, this was mostly old
guys: people from my parents generation. They were wicked smart, experienced,
and they worked a desk away from me.

The company eventually went under, which I saw coming. My first project was
creating a daily reports system, so I was intimately familiar with site usage
statistics, and they were not good.

The Summer of 2001, I called my old boss and asked if I had a job. " _I_ don't
have a job," he said. So it goes.

------
blender
I joined a market-leading publicly traded company in Sept/99 just in time to
see the existing employees become wealthy at the peak of the bubble while my
options which vested after the bubble gave very modest returns.

Luck and timing... luck and timing...

Cheers

------
icey
I started working as a developer working on the web in 1995, and somehow
managed to avoid the bags full of cash and sports cars that were falling from
the sky.

I did my first internet startup in 1997, a "secure remote data storage
solution" which bombed due to partnering issues unfortunately.

I did get to spend lots of time consulting on companies doing things that were
varying degrees of ridiculous, which was a great learning experience.

To this day I get a kick out of the people who told me the internet was a toy
that wouldn't ever amount to anything. (This was in 93-95 when I was still
learning and convinced that I wanted to do web work).

------
babul
Most of the comments here are coulda/shoulda/woulda/if-only. We all make
mistakes and fail, but it is the learning from them that is important. Failure
is good. You are not making progress until you are failing.

------
breck
High school. Making web pages for local businesses and fixing computers for
neighbors. In hindsight, I wish I had met other programmers and learned
programming instead of how to write HTML and use Photoshop.

I was surrounded by blue collar people, and politicians, lawyers, and
businessmen growing up(and their families), and can't think of one engineering
type or programmer I met before college.

Not that I regret one thing about my life, it's been plenty of fun, it just
seems that starting a successful net company would have been easier had I
gotten into it earlier.

------
mechanical_fish
ArsDigita.

I think I've finally recovered. :)

------
davidw
I worked at CKS Partners, in Portland, Oregon and then at Linuxcare in San
Francisco and subsequently the office in Padova, Italy, where I landed when
things fell apart.

------
alaskamiller
I was in junior high at the epicenter of the dot-com boom. I came home every
day to watch CNBC report on the newest IPO. I remember watching VAlinux
debuting and it reaching several hundreds of dollar on opening day. As a
b-roll they interviewed the CEO and watched him drop his credit card bills
into the mail box. He's finally able to pay off his bills now that he's worth
millions on paper.

Oh how I wish I was just a bit older back then..

------
colortone
I was battling with my finance professors about whether AMZ was going to fail
or be huge.

I was short AMZ and long B&N in my 19 year old wisdom ;-)

------
strlen
Junior in high school, working as a UNIX Systems Administrator - got hired (at
17) by a .com company. Ended up learning Perl and MySQL out of it. Very
fortunate that the boom ended and I lost my job (and ended up going to
college), as staying as a Systems Administrator wasn't where my heart lay.

------
vlad
Writing games with graphics in QuickBasic 6.5, and learning Visual Basic 4 at
the start of high school. Acing AP Computer Science twice in my last two
years, since I wanted to learn both curriculums: C++ in Codewarrior in 11th
grade, and Java in Notepad in 12th. (Java 1.1 or 1.2, it was.)

------
Shooter
At the 'height of the boom', I was working on an internet startup...in
Indiana...and the startup was, uh, concrete-related.

Needless to say, I served as a punchline for all of my friends that had moved
to the Valley to make their fortunes.

Until they needed to borrow money because their options were underwater.

Boring FTW!

------
paraschopra
I was in 10th grade and was already part of the craze. I remember, even in
India, it was a euphoria-like atmosphere. Companies offering T-shirts for
clicking ads, internet connection for free. Heck, even domain names for free.

Those were the days... :)

------
auston
I was skateboarding and video editing.

Messing about with HTML whenever I was hurt from skateboarding.

------
jmtulloss
I made my first web app; a library card system for my church that ran on
AppleScript and FileMaker. The search was just a loop that compared the word
the user searched for with each record. Needless to say, it did not scale.

------
truebosko
I was playing hockey in the streets with my friends. Basically, I was still in
school (not college) and I was young. Sometimes at night, I would write a
little bit of HTML and Javascript when no one was looking though ;)

------
YuriNiyazov
I was in high school, writing Windows freeware and selling it to Winzip.

------
bjelkeman-again
Founded an internet software company in SF that went down when the bubble
burst. Was a great experience and several of the team are back together again,
this time doing much better.

------
brandonkm
I was in the 6th grade making websites in HTML on angelfire and geocities for
all of my friends. I was also using napster all the time and playing online
yahoo chess obsessively.

------
allenbrunson
i was working at be in 2001, the makers of beos. i knew they were in a bit of
hot water, because beos wasn't selling at all, and they'd switched to working
on embedded devices. but the company had been in business for over 10 years at
that point, so i figured they'd keep finding a way.

alas, be went out of business seven months after i started working there.
largely due to the dot-com bust. investors were getting very conservative.
also due to microsoft's oem agreements.

------
smakz
2000 was my last year in high school. Major regret is spending the next 4
years in university instead of building my empire.

------
tptacek
We started an FEC multicast streaming media company in '98 (got funded in '99)
which flamed out with the CDN market in 2001.

------
radley
Designing rave flyers, DJing, and producing a public access show called VJTV.

I wanted a different life experience and refused to go dot-com.

------
LogicHoleFlaw
I was in High School, trying to figure out whether I wanted to major in
Computer Science or Bassoon Performance.

------
icco
I was in middle school, enjoying living in the valley. Then it started to
crash and we moved away ;)

------
lally_singh
Finished my CS undergrad in 2001.

I think the boom was a great lesson for techies to remember the business model
:-)

------
pavelludiq
playing starcraft and diablo 2. The only web site that i visited was
pokemon.com and google.

------
vizard
I was in the tenth grade and breaking all my personal weight records by
gaining 5kg/month.

------
bigbang
I was looking at the crazy money being poured and hitting my head against the
keyboard

------
feverishaaron
Working my ass off at CKS/USWebCKS/marchFIRST

------
maxklein
I wrote software, sold it and made money.

------
lyime
I was in Middle School

------
brianm
Teaching high school.

------
azsromej
in college, getting a co-op job at a software company

------
time_management
12th grade, reading Business 2.0 with windowside envy, wishing I was doing
something cool, like starting a game company.

