
Ask HN: What company were you at when the dot-com bubble burst in mid 2000? - TheBiv
General sub-questions: What was your title? What short lessons did you learn at your company? What did you wish that you knew then, that you know now?
======
rdl
I was living on a tiny platform (Sealand) in the north sea, working on my
startup HavenCo (offshore datahaven, hosting a variety of services which were
worried about legal and jurisdictional issues), from 2000-2003.

My title was initially CTO, and then "last person left".

Short lessons:

* lots of press coverage can be a pain to manage.

* be careful about plans which depend on a full funding round (make sure you are still able to do at least 1/3 of the work with 1/3 of the money, and get to a viable product

* try to prove concepts cheaply early on

* don't let the company use your personal credit, it might collapse and you'll be >$200k in debt at 21...

I regret not bailing for Google in 2001 when it was an option.

------
po
I had just left a mobile healthcare company (Palm VII's and Palm V's with a
giant data sled!!!) I had founded in college with some friends that was doomed
for failure.

I had just graduated and started at a small mobile company (hockey-stick
growth!) that was trying to convince distributors that putting cell phones in
Coke machines to call home was a good idea. I was told the company was
planning to double in size that year. I was the last guy they hired.

About 4 months later I got laid off when the company went from 60 employees
down to about 10 in one afternoon. I felt horrible. I then went through a get-
hired/layoff cycle despite giving 110% effort at each new job. Oddly enough,
each new position paid better and I sharpened my skills. I learned the art of
the interview, and I learned that sometimes getting laid off has nothing to do
with you.

Being rejected and forced to claw my way into the field with little experience
was good for me, but for a while I overvalued job security.

I learned this: always have a few months living expenses in the bank. When the
music stops, you won't have time to run and grab a chair. Live on Ramen and
pickles until you have saved up enough and then make that number your new
"empty". If you increase your cost of living, increase your reserve. Bank
account:2mos is the new Inbox:0

~~~
petervandijck
4 months of emergency funds + 4 months per dependent is my rule of thumb.

~~~
po
I like that rule. Two months is definitely an absolute minimum. That's when
you pull your pockets inside out and say you're broke.

------
fingerprinter
I was working at a video streaming company called in CT. They bought tons of
bandwidth and had HUGE datacenters throughout the country. We streamed events
live that had not been done before (Island hole @ Master's championship etc).

We started to do TV shows and movies (had deals with major movies studios...).
We were basically Hulu in 1999/2000 but the technology sucked at the time. Our
choices were Real or Windows format video. Both were bad and required
conversion to that format which took a long time in those days.

$75 million in funding, lots of bandwidth bough, some good examples of what we
could do, but ultimately we burned money like most did back then. We tried to
sell but when the market tanked most suitors walked away and the company just
folded. Great lessons to learn right out of college.

After that experience I wanted to work for a more stable company right after.
Since I was getting married I wanted to work for a company making money and
one that would weather the down turn in the market. I accepted a job w/ Enron
:/ Anyone want to guess how long that one lasted? I still have option
certificates for something like $62.50...yikes.

------
jasonkester
I was working for this little company called Trailworks.com, burning through a
mere 25 million dollars in the course of six months.

They hit the ground hard shortly after launch, laid off all their staff, then
brought me and one dba back on contract to mothball everything. I quoted an
extortionate rate and they gladly jumped on it. For the next 3 months, the
phone would ring several times a week with recruiters offering progressively
more ludicrous contract rates for new gigs. Times were fat, so I turned them
all down.

Mothballing complete, I turned down a new slew of dream gigs and hopped a
flight to Thailand and Australia. 5 months later, tanned and grinning, I
landed in the 'states and called up my recruiter:

"Hey, remember all those awesome gigs you had for crazy contract rates? I'll
take one o' them, thanks."

"Uh... We don't have any more of those. Didn't you hear? We have some regular
jobs for regular money, if you'd like."

"oh."

"Yeah. And you might want to check your eTrade account while you're at it..."

Gotta say though, it was a fun ride while it was happening. Everybody knew it
was too good to be true, but we were happy to party like it was 1999. Cause,
you know, it was.

------
muhfuhkuh
I was in a software company with a product that made it easier to interoperate
with different OSes. I was doing tech support on e-mail and phone duty and did
QA work on the side.

The #1 thing is to sniff out the signs of a poorly run company which, believe
me, even if you couldn't care less about the machinations of business much
less have never run one, you can still see the warning flags a country mile
away.

When there is no clear oversight of who is keeping tabs, you're in trouble.
This ill-fated company company had a staff at most 60 and yet we had a tech
closet with _literally_ a laundry basket full of RAM; for WHAT? I had no idea.
That was just the tip of the iceberg.

I knew it was over about 6 months later when the CEO hired a friend to run
marketing and the guy ordered Aeron chairs for him and his hangers-on "team".
Then we had a huge blowout shindig replete with house band, Filet Mignon and
an open bar. Everyone was completely wasted and well-fed. It was glorious.

3 months later we were all laid off.

------
robflynn
I was working for a company in Irvine, CA that did VoIP/telephony.

Some of our stuff was pretty neat. We ended up open sourcing part of the
project. It was a C++/CORBA system that allowed for passing of messages of
different types (calendar, bulletin board, e-mail, faxes, and voicemails)
across the various transports.

It looks like the sourceforge site still exists:
<http://tucan.sourceforge.net>

Ironically, the company was called Difinium at the time it folded and I ended
up moving from there to Digium doing similar things with Asterisk.

------
allenbrunson
I was a C++ developer at Be, that made an alternative OS called BeOS. Perhaps
a few of you have heard of it (heh).

Unfortunately, I started too late, after the company had more or less given up
trying to market BeOS as a standalone product. They had shifted their focus to
internet appliances. We were working on the Sony eVilla at the time, which
proved to be a huge disaster.

The company had been managing to get investments for 11 years, based on their
excellent tech demos. But when the dot-com bust happened, the funding dried
up. The company was acquired by Palm, and all but the 50 most valuable
employees were laid off. I definitely wasn't in that elite group, so I was out
the door.

That was the one and only time I've managed to get hired at an A-level tech
company. I suck at marketing myself.

------
InclinedPlane
I was working at a tiny company (at times just me and the president/owner)
providing shopping cart SaaS. Initially I quit 'cause I was tired of working
there but continued on as a contractor at higher pay for several months. I
left completely when they stopped being able to pay me. I can't tell if
they're still around but the company certainly hasn't lived up to its
potential, they never made a serious investment in technology and have fallen
hugely behind all of the competition.

My title was irrelevant due to the size of the company.

Short lessons? Probably to get out sooner rather than later when you recognize
deep problems in a company.

I wish I knew how much my skills were worth back then and a better way to
market them.

------
pigboy
Principal Software Designer for embedded systems at Simplex Time Recorder, a
subsidiary of Tyco International.

The dot-com bubble involved more than Internet companies as Tyco's stock
crashed amid scandal involving its CEO. For me this led to downsizing,
layoffs, a year of consulting, three of working under lousy conditions and
finally a complete career change to teaching.

Lesson learned? The free enterprise system is seriously flawed. I watched a
thriving, innovative American business get eaten alive by Tyco. A handful got
filthy rich while thousands of workers lost their jobs as production moved
overseas. Shameful..

------
tomh
I was working for a IT recruiting company, managing a team that essentially
was pulling down and parsing every resume from the job sites at that time -
Monster.com, Dice.com, HotJobs, etc. Recruiters were on the phone every day to
try and find guys who knew all the 'hot' tech at the time - Vignette was a
really big ticket item, for example, with six-figure salaries and a high
percent for recruiters.

It wasn't a 'boiler room' mentality--far from it--and we had plans to really
grow, after creating our own database of resumes.

Of course, that ran out of steam when the bust came and there was only really
one company which had the resume database market covered, and that was
Monster. By that time, I had moved on to another company called ArsDigita.
Hmm, out of the frying pan...

------
baggachipz
I was a web developer at The Motley Fool (fool.com). I learned that even a
company whose credo was fiscal responsibility is not immune to hype (but it
was an awesome place to work). I wish I knew then that stock options are _not_
guaranteed riches in the future.

------
dpcan
I was a developer at a startup that specialized in creating some cool fleet
management software for the trucking industry, as well as some way-ahead-of-
its-time mobile technology (WAP).

I personally believe that if this company re-booted and started up again
today, it would rock.

~~~
DevX101
I don't anything about that industry but I would assume that the trucking
industry already has pretty advanced fleet tracking & management, do they not?

If I'm a Walmart or a Best Buy I'd make it a priority to know exactly where
all my trucks are at all times.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Neither do I, but I wouldn't assume that either. What about all the small
fleet truckers that you never hear about? Everyone needs software, but not
everyone needs Enterprise Level Software.

------
damncabbage
McDonald's (Back Crew). :)

------
aeden
CTO at a domain registrar. Our company actually survived the pop and
eventually was "sold" for other reasons. The main things I learned from that
experience was that it is important to be conscious of competitor pricing and
how it affects your market. It's ok to be more expensive than your
competitors, but you have to differentiate to back that up. Being expensive
just because you're ignoring the marketplace will end up causing trouble.
Also, be frugal and focus (although I don't think I really learned this until
after I failed numerous other times - sometimes I still wonder if I have
learned the lesson).

------
petercooper
Working for Internet.com as, bizarrely, one of two editors-in-chief of
WebDeveloper.com (along with David Fiedler). I quit sometime in 2000 but then,
unfortunately, Internet.com turned it into a forum instead of a news site not
long after.

I learnt a lot about how to write, how to get content out quick (mine or edit
someone else's), how to stick to a style guide, and pretty much everything
about running a high octane content site. Skills that have proven useful right
up to the current day.

------
jolan
Motorola. "Remote Access Server/Software Deployment Engineer".

I learned that I never wanted to work for a big company again. It was a big
ordeal to a manager's sized cubicle for me so I'd have the proper space to do
my job (build and image servers).

The good things I learned were process/project management, UNIX in a
production environment, and an appreciation for Sun workstations.

------
russellossme
I had just started at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve> as a developer.
And stayed there for a further 4 years. The bubble burst but the number of
people wanting to get online to look at boobies was still boooooming.

------
pan69
I was working as a developer for a large outsourcing organisation (Capgemini)
in Europe at that time. What I remember the most is the enormous amount of
middle-management that was retrenched. Most people I knew in tech seem to have
made it through the burst in one piece back then.

------
warmfuzzykitten
WebGain, a company that could not have existed without the bubble, though it
staggered on through 2001. First wave of layoffs in November, the company died
5 months later.

Taught me to never value stock options more than common sense.

------
sunkan
I was working at E.piphany ( Steve Blank was one of the founder). I remember
going through three rounds of layoffs in three months in the professional
services organization, which I was part of. Good old days :)

------
ct
I was in college working part-time doing websites, etc. Should've dropped out
and went full-time with several of the offers being given. But at the time I
sort of wanted to finish the college thing.

------
davidw
I was working at Linuxcare. I wish I knew more about business and economics
then - I was pretty focused on the open source stuff.

------
zorkerman
My own, and it was crashing, though only coincidentally coinciding with the
dot-com crash.

------
toadi
I'm getting so old I already have experienced several bubble bursts ;)

------
ericgs
Wasn't the .com bubble more mid-90's than mid-2000's?

~~~
TheBiv
My apologies for not clarifying...I meant when the dot com bubble burst in the
mid-2000's.

Edit: to prevent any other miscommunication in the title.

~~~
KevinMS
It popped year 2000, there was no event in the mid 2000s

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasdaq2.png>

------
masonmark
In 2003 I was just a few years out of college, working for ClickSitez Japan,
K.K., a startup trying to convince VCs that people were going to do their
photos on the interweb tubes. We had angel funding and a prototype/demo with
one and only one error-free path through it (the "shining path", one of our
advisors called it, and the name stuck). We on the engineering side divided
our time between coding the prototype and helping the bizdev guys pitch it to
anybody who'd listen: VCs, other dot-coms, even NTT.

My business card read VP/UX, which was supposed to mean "Vice President, User
Experience". Like a lot of dot-com startups at the time, we had like 7 vice
presidents of this or that, with only 2 staffers below VP level.

What I actually _did_ know then, and simply wish I had factored into my
decision-making processes more, was that the dot-com bubble was a bubble and
that trying to play the stock game in a bubble isn't fundamentally different
from playing blackjack. Bootstrapping is preferable to chasing investors, in
retrospect.

Of course, everybody knew it was a bubble; the technology stock analyst I was
dating at the time told me, "Yeah. It's a bubble, but it's still paying out.
So there will still be money to be made here, until the day comes that it
_was_ a bubble."

It was March 2000 when that day came, as near as I can recall. We never got
that next funding round, and as it started to become clear that the party was
over, the three of us who could code went our separate ways, and the company
was acquired by some short-lived web consulting company, which was in turn
acquired by somebody else, and ultimately was bought by the posterboy of dot-
com Internet flameouts, marchFIRST.

The most valuable lesson that has stuck with me is that none of these people--
investors, analysts, "experts", bosses, underlings, dot-celebrities of the day
--knew what the hell they were talking about.

I'm not saying that I did, mind you--nobody did. That's why these things are
assigned descriptors like "revolutionary, disruptive technological paradigm
shift". Because nobody knows what the hell all the effects are going to be.

Not many of the things such hyperbolic labels are applied to actually turn out
to do all that much disrupting. But the dot-com revolution was different--it
was a bona-fide Gutenberg-level event, and for all the billions of dollars
that were bandied about and the huge transfers of wealth and the frenzied
investment in it, that was really just a pretty minor part of the whole
picture. The impact of the Internet becoming a mainstream part of modern human
society goes much deeper than that.

And that's what made it fun to be living and breathing every day. Despite all
the missed opportunities and inevitable what-ifs looking back, I'm glad I was
there.

~~~
veidr
Ooops, second word there is a typo--should be 2000, sigh.

------
wlievens
Born in '83, so in 2000 I was in high school :-)

~~~
mnazim
:D me 2

------
Strunk
I'm from '90, so in school... :)

------
phirephly
Cupertino Middle School. B-)

------
philfreo
I was 13 or 14...

------
lclaude01
I was working as a Senior Project Manager / Designer at Contempo Design
(Architecture and Design) in San Francisco. One of my project was goto.com in
Pasadena, California. It was beautiful, 4 floors of pure modern. Goto.com went
belly up not long after (under Disney). Large projects with Bank of America
and Charles Schwab kept me busy for 3 years.

