The Dot Com Crash

where that one came from. Yeah, we are going to tackle a subject that a lot of listeners have asked us to talk about, both on Facebook and an email, possibly on Twitter as well. But we've received many requests to talk about the dot com bubble and crash of two thousand, two thousand one. And it's an interesting story and it's certainly has some lessons that we can learn, uh, particularly with certain companies that are operating right now. That's

that's absolutely true. Um. I have the occasion to work in technology during the dot com bubble years um, and it was a crazy ride. Yeah, it was very exciting time for a while, and then it was a very terrifying time. But uh, but to build into this, we should really kind of give you a a bird's eye view of what was going on at the time. So the World Wide Web really started to make penetration into

the public in ninety three or so. Yeah, it's funny because a lot of people, I think still really have no idea that the Internet, uh was born decades really before before you know, we were all using the web for you know, keeping up with everyone and and you know, communications of different kinds. Um. But yeah, I mean that once the Web arrived on the scene, that enabled a lot of people to do things that with computers that

they wouldn't necessarily have done. So I remember it's funny because I was thinking about this on my way into the studio this morning. There was a game show I was watching, um and uh, I think it was Alan Ludden who was hosting it is one of the older shows on Game Show Network, and one of the prizes was a home computer. This was in the probably late

nineteen eighties when this was the show is from. And he's he's like, okay, well, if you want to I'm paraphrasing because it's been so along, but you've won a personal home computer. Although I don't know what you would do with something like which cracks me up now because the Internet and especially the Web, has made it possible to do so many different kinds of things like online banking and watching uh shows and and keeping up with calendars and reading the news and kinds of friends. Yeah,

but we we didn't do that before. And once the web came around, people started going, wait, I know you could make up you know, fill in the blank here, and there wasn't one already. You didn't say, you know, I could make an online banking site. Oh no, you know, the giant World Bank has already done that. Well, I maybe I could come up with a way to network

with my friends. Now there's already a Facebook. These these people were creating these things from scratch and it was a really heady time because everybody wanted to be the first in and make loads of money from doing this, although they didn't really necessarily know how, right, I I equate the early days of the web, and really, even though ninety three was when the public started getting hold of the web, is when businesses started to really look at how can we use this as a way to

make money? Or not just business is looking into it, but people looking into it thinking how can I form a business that uses the web as a platform. Uh, But I equate it to a land grab Like like, imagine that you have come to a new country and there's a huge territory that is open and it has a set amount of of land that's available for a set price, right, and there are and it's divided up into certain sections, and then essentially on a certain day

you are allowed to go and stake your claim. You would actually go and you would stake your claim, put it, you know, say this land is what I'm purchasing and that would become yours. And you know there's risk involved in that because you might you might go and grab land and then find out that you thought that maybe there'd be a good place to dig a well and it turns out there is no good place to dig

a well on that land. Or you know, you thought that the land that the section you grabbed was gonna be great for farming, and then you realize, oh wait, this is really rocky ground that's not going to be easy to farm at all. Same sort of thing with the web, really is this idea of this this this frontier that have been mostly unoccupied, especially from a business perspective, and it gave people the idea that anything is possible, and as long as I have a good idea, I

can build up a customer base. And once I build up my customer base, I can find a way to make money from them. That was kind of the problem was that they first thought, I need to get people, and then I need to figure out how to make money from them. Yep, yep, and I think uh, I think it bears UM bears going into Also the it

wasn't just the tech sector. People within the tech sector who were excited about this UM In the mid nineties, that's when people started getting really excited about UH internet access and getting home computers so that they could use the Internet at their homes. And once people realize this, they started thinking, you know what, I bet these companies, UH, you know, they might be worth something someday, especially because UM, I think people were saying, hey, you've really got something here.

So a lot of these companies would issue UH stock to join the stock market, and UH I was I was looking into this last night as I was doing my research. UH. Andrew Batty wrote an article about bubbles for Investipedia, and UM, I wanted to just give you the definition of a bubble based on on his article. Um, you know, he actually wrote about it. A lot of different famous bubbles that have happened, a lot of them in real estate. You know, there are many bubbles, not

just this one. But the idea is that people are really excited about a product that is on the stock market, and they're so excited that they keep buying it. They want more stock, as much stock as they can get,

and that drives the price at the stock up. And eventually, though the company, the the actual worth of the company can't match what the perceived value is in the stock market, and it keeps inflating and inflating, inflating, And so there's a company might be worth say twenty million dollars, but it has you know, in the stock market, it's far more than that. So eventually hundred million dollars and shares out exactly. And at some point when the company falters,

the the bubble can burst. People suddenly realize, oh my gosh, this company is not worth but that much. It's sell their stock exactly. And then you you end up with a company where it's it's yeah, it starts to fall apart. Uh, Yeah, the we call this this this whole idea speculation, right. Stock market speculation and speculation is essentially when you bet

it's it's usually it's it's um related to short term gains. Yes, you know, you're looking at the stock market momentum, and you're not necessarily a lot of people who were investing weren't necessarily looking into companies they were particularly interested in. They were betting that the company they were investing in was going to explode and that it would either are become wildly successful, in which case you become rich, or we get acquired by a bigger company, in which case

you get rich. So it seemed like a no brainer. You know, you just you do. You throw in money and these small companies as soon as they become available, and then you just watch your your cash increase. Uh. But the problem is that when more and more people get involved in this speculation, it does drive the price up, and it drives it up well beyond the company's worth, like you were saying, And so it's very high risk,

it's fast paced. Uh you can you I mean, if you want to indulge in in being a speculator on the stock market, you have the potential to make a lot of money, but you have to you have to be really nimble, and people are not gonna like you because you're you're not investing in a company in order to have that company succeed. You're investing in a company kind of like if you were in Las Vegas and you were making a bet on a poker game right now.

Of course, it's not as simple as as coming up with an idea in your bedroom one night, writing it down, sketching it up on a napkin for five five friends, and then starting the company the next day and then becoming rich. There there's many many steps in between. Um. What the piece that we may that you may be missing if you're unfamiliar with a lot of this is the venture capitalists and these are these are people who

are our business people looking to make initial investments. Um, you know you have your your five friends with you, you've started your company, but you know you've maxed all of you have maxed out your credit cards trying to get this thing off the ground. And you say, well, you know where am I going to come up with some money? I'm scratching my head but you can't see it. Uh, and a nice visual. Um, So, yeah, what am I gonna do? Well, these venture capitalists might want to talk

to you. You might go into the boardroom, meet with the with the people at the firm and say, look, here's our idea. These are the five things you want to accomplish to do it. We figure we're gonna need, you know, fifteen million dollars to really tool up and make this thing a possibility. If you can convince those investors, those initial investors, uh, that you really have a case, they might be willing to give you some money and

to to get the company started. So then you could go ahead and rent some office space, get your you know, copier and your computers, and you know, hire a couple of people to help you along. Yeah. Yeah, you've got a lot of overhead costs that you've got to take care of. These these uh initial investments come from these

venture capitalists. And I was reading on an article in San Francisco Chronicle by Tom Abate, who um, who did a piece on the dot com bubble, and was saying that, uh, venture capital firms would, uh we're just going nuts funding this. In fact, that one of my supervisors want to work for a tech company left to join an adventure capital firm. We all thought that was really cool, um, which it which it was, But yeah, I mean, but again, this

was a no brainer. They were coming up with the greatest ideas fresh off the right out of the UH factory, if you know, um, and they were. He said that.

Abate said that venture capitalists in the in two thousand made about eight thousand investments valued at about a hundred point five million dollars um, which doesn't sound like a lot, it's like a hundred million dollars, but you know, that's the money that gets the company off the ground to the point where they can go ahead and raise enough interest from an investment firm to get you a an I p O an initial public offering of stock. That's

where the public launch just stuck within that company. So yeah, you start your company, you get some people to to give you some funding to get off the ground, you get moving. Then you go to the big banks and say, hey, if we can launch some stock, I know we're all gonna get rich. And once they do that, and the people, and believe me, there were lots of stock watch pages.

People speculated all the time about who was going to have an I p O and and which which new tech company was you know, these guys were any good who where they come from? You know, and people people were following which I p o s were coming in in the weeks and months ahead, so that you could go ahead and buy in on the first day and in a lot of cases the stock which you right

up immediately out of the gate. Yeah. Yeah, to the point where if you were not in on it at the very beginning, then yeah, I mean there were still people who were purchasing stock prices even at high points because they were there were you know, the sky was the limit. There was no ceiling as far as anyone

can tell for these companies and UM. And one of the risks of venture capital, and I find this interesting, is that there are times where um, a startup company will get more venture capital than it needs to get off the ground. And that's actually a problem. It's not you know, because the company has to figure out what

to do with that money. And it may be like, let's say that there's a company that starts up that needs approximately twenty million dollars in venture capital to really start, but they get a hundred million dollars in venture capital. This is what leads to this can lead to bad habits, bad practices, for example, and a lot of these dot com companies fell into this trap where they started spending their venture capital on let's call them luxuries or lavish,

lavish settings. Oh yes, because the dot com companies a lot of them in places like Mountain View, California, and San Francisco, San Francisco area, a lot of them. There will look quite a few of them here in Atlanta. Yeah, actually Atlanta had a lot of the dot com crash hurt Atlanta a lot. If you if you want to get an idea what it was like at the heyday, go to how Stuff Works dot com and read Jonathan's

article on the Google Plex. Google still has offices very reminiscent of the kinds with the kinds of amenities that you would see in these places. But one of the cool things about the dot commerce was they wanted to attract the best in the brightest, so they would they would load up on these on things like foodsball tables, and arcades. They're trying to hire like like graduate students right out of school, so so schools like m I T.

Georgia Tech. I mean, these these te yeah, cal Tech. Yeah, these these schools we were like the seed farms for for these companies. I mean they were going after these these students, sometimes hiring them right off, like out of college. They haven't even graduated. Yes, I I know. People as a matter of fact, you think of that as being a sports phenomenon. Oh well he's not coming back for a senior year because he signed with you know, joined the draft or something. Yeah. They some of these uh

tech wizards. You know, we're talking like you know, eighteen nineteen twenty years old, they would get pulled out of college. UM. You know, there there's an incubator, which is what you call a UM an office space where little companies go UM at the Georgia Tech campus that I've been to UM and you see like office after offices. You know there in each office is a little company that's just getting started. UM. They get a little office space and a chance to to to get started on their business.

But yeah, I mean if you have this stuff happening right next to the campus, it's easy for them to to do some recruiting and uh and and also the companies that were slightly larger that had had an I p O UM they would lure people in with stock options. Yeah, you would get paid in stock options, and since the companies were doing so well, that made you instantly a millionaire. That's not a joke. There were people who were joining

companies and essentially overnight being a millionaire. If you were able to consider the stock options as being equivalent to, you know, the their perceived market value at the time. Yes, that's that's correct. And you have to, uh, you have to think about like, well, okay, so what if I join Giant Internet Co. And I, you know, I just come there and they pay me all these millions in stock options and I, you know, buy the stock and leave.

I could just be a millionaire. Well know, a lot of these had a vesting period, so you'd have this these options on paper, and you had the right to buy them at a at a low price um or at the price of the data issues. So if you joined the company when the stock was three dollars a share um that you had the right to that that's locked in. But in order to actually get that stock or the right to actually buy the stock, you have to work there for so and so many years. So

in two that was four years. You could get your you know you can. You can get your eight thousand shares a stock at three dollars this year. Meanwhile, the stock price had risen to ninety nine dollars a year. Wham, you've got lots and lots of money. But unfortunately did not work out that way, not well for a lot of people, but for some people that did. But that was during the bubble, as the stock prices continued to inflate. And um, you know, because the bubble started forming, like

we said in the mid nineties. Uh, and it really reached it's its height in two thousand. Yes, and again from the article in the Chronicle March tenth, two thousand the peak five. This is the NASTAC, one of the stock exchanges here in the United States, a lot of it's not exclusively a tech stock exchange, but there are a lot a lot of tech stocks on there. Um. The NASTAC hit its peak of UM five thousand onety two fifty two UM, and then it virtually overnight crashed.

Now um, the low point of the NASDAC was a couple of years later October nine, two thousand two, where it reached one thousand eleven. That's a seventy eight percent drop over two and a half years, two and a half years, seventy eight percent of the value of that of that stock exchange gone. Well, that's because it's because of a lot of things. So a lot of the tech companies delivered on their promises, but all of them did. There let's let's talk about some of the companies that

started during this this uh this bubble. There are a few that are still around. There's eBay, which did quite well. There's Amazon, which Amazon followed a pattern that a lot of companies followed. Amazon made it work and most of the other companies did not. And that was the pattern that was kind of talking about earlier, where you try to get as many customers as possible and then you figure out a way to make money from them. Amazon did followed this, get big, get fast, and then make money.

So the idea was that, all right, well, we need to hit as many people as possible, because that was the promise of the web. Correct. I mean you think of your average store, all right, your average physical store, physical brick and mortar store. There's a limit to the number of people who can go in and out of that store in a single day. Yes, if you want to know. If you really want to get into uh depth on this, you can read Chris Anderson's article in

Wired magazine, The long Tail. He actually did a book on that too that might be available to your local library. But um, but yeah, I mean, Jonathan's right, there's you've got your local store, but you know it's it's also got so much it can carry, so you're limited to the stuff they think they can move. And if you want something that was published fifteen years ago, it may not be on your local store shelves anymore. So you've got a physical limit to how much you can have.

You have a physical limit to how many people can visit your regionally based right, So I mean there's gonna be a limit to how far people are willing to travel to get to your store. But on the web, all of those disappear yep, right, because you you can have an unlimited number of people well, assuming your bandwidth can handle it, you can you can have a virtually

unlimited number of people visit your store. You can have a virtually limitless inventory because you can always order whatever, Like, if you start selling out something, you can always order from the manufacturer more items of that until that dries up and and there's no regional limit essentially, and then you might be somewhat limited by whatever country you're in. But that's a lot different than being like, if I have a store in Atlanta, Georgia, and that's my only store,

then essentially I'm catering to Atlanta. But if I have a website and my my my website is based out of Atlanta, but it goes everywhere, then my customers are the world. That is a phenomenal thing. Yes, Now, I mean you have something else too at your disposal, which

is a method of communicating with potential customers. Now you Jonathan Store here in Atlanta, Georgia, Um, well, you've got people where it has spread throughout the state, maybe to uh neighboring states like South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. And you know, people buy something here and go home. So you know, five or six people in New York, a couple of people in California know about Jonathan Store.

They think it's cool. Maybe he comes out with a mail order catalog and get some more at business or do I maybe I franchise or maybe he franchises. But the thing is the word word of mouth is spreading and there's only so much advertising you're gonna I mean, he's not gonna put TV ads on in Wisconsin because they can't come into the store. They could get a catalog. And you know, of course there are many many success stories,

people like seers who managed to make that work. Um, but that that's a painstaking into the Internet makes that so much easier because using search engines you can find It's like, you know, new and used books, where am I going to find? Oh, there's a store called Amazon dot com? What's here? And then you know, Amazon for it's part two, only has to maintain a handful of warehouses. They can put one in the Northeast, they can put one in the Southeast, they could put one in the Midwest.

They have four or five buildings from which they ship stuff in the United States. They keep their overhead low. People aren't browsing through and damaging copies, people aren't shoplifting. There are many advantages that that the Internet gives a store that it wouldn't have. And so e commerce was one of the huge things that happened during the dot com boom because, um, you know, and it's scared the Willie's out of other stores, I mean Barnes and Nobles, Borders, uh,

you know, which are big chains here in the United States. Immediately, you know, started working on one, probably not immediately, but shortly after. Immediately UM started working on some kind of online strategy. And not everyone has succeeded at that. Yeah. See, Amazon, they got big fast, but they didn't overspend, right, They didn't invest in in warehouses they didn't need or technology

that was superfluous. They were very wise about their spinning choices and that's part of what helped them survive that the eventual crash. Uh. eBay had a very strong community at the time. UM still does, but it was a little different because back back then we're talking mainly auction based transactions. Now today it's it's changed a little bit, right,

It's it's it's closer Amazon than it used to be. UM. And then you had Craigslist that also started during the dot com boom, and that was a different model entirely because that was sort of a it was sort of

an extension of the old BBS community boards. Yeah. Yeah, well and and and correct me if I'm wrong, but both eBay and Craigslist were local, yes, operations until you know, word got out and people started saying, hey, I want this, I want to be able to you know, eBay was initially designed to be for the San Francisco area, right the Bay right, So that's uh, it's it's just funny how you know, well San Francisco man, you guys with

your little Silicon valley and stuff. Um But there were other other big sites that also started in the in the in the boom that didn't ultimately do so well, like geo cities Cities. Geo Cities actually got so big that um, Yahoo decided to purchase them in for an enormous some three point five seven billion dollars. And where is geo now anyway, it's gone. Yeah who shut it

down in two thousand nine. So you know that it was one of those purchases that at the time it seemed like it was a wise decision because everyone was getting a geo cities account and we saw so many terrible websites with with looping middies and animated gifts and uh, and there was the required under construction image that had to be on there something. Yeah, usually the guy with a shovel or it was a hard hat, or it was like the tape. But yeah, there was always an

under construction. And guys, just so you know, if you're building your first website, I know all of you know this. We understand it's under construction. The web is a fluid thing, so you don't need to tell us it's always going to be changing. But um also A O L at that time, this is how big these companies were getting. Okay, so during this this boom, a O L A a web based company now grant. They had started off with sort of there were no spahns, an online service provider,

so they weren't they weren't part of the internet. You dialed directly into that. They did a podcast. Yeah, they were their own network. But then they of course transition to the internet. When the web started to take off, A O L acquired Time Warner. This was a huge story, still is actually because now it's looked at as one

of the worst business decisions of all time. For now anyway, Yeah, I'm sure someone else will do something even more but crazy, but at any rates, one of those where in retrospect, it was one of those things where just because the company can do something, maybe they shouldn't. It might not need to so, but there were other ones like pets dot Com. Oh, pets dot com was was one of those.

There were there were many, Uh, there are many of these startups that became big and you can look back on them now and go, what on earth were they thinking? But pets dot Com was not one of them. It was an online uh pet retailer, so I mean not not pets but pet supplies and uh their commercials were very famous because they had a talking hand puppet dog with a microphone. Um he he actually went on to work for someone else. But pets dot Com, uh, you know,

just did not did not end up working out. And of course the major uh pet um stores in the United States here all have an online presence sort of like pets dot Com. But at the time, I guess we weren't ready for it. Yeah, I can tell you if you want to hear about some big companies. That are some companies that made big news in in in the world of failure. Uh boo dot com is hard to beat. You boot dot com. Of course, if you're in the United States, you're gonna be going. I'm not

sure I've heard of them. But in the United Kingdom, I bet you have Boo dot com fashion clothing supplier of website so Boo dot Com spent over a hundred million dollars. The company spent over a hundred million dollars before ever offering a single article of clothing for sale on its site. Also, they decided to push the envelope and be really uh cutting edge with their tech. So there was an animated personal assistant, a sales assistant who would help you on the site so that you have

this animated character. The problem was, at this time, in the late nineties early two thousand's, uh, people were still using dial up. You know, the broadband was not an option, and so using something as as broadband intense, as an animated character to deliver your your product or to deliver the experience to the consumer, meant that it was even

harder to get there and to experience it. So in its brief life, it's sold just a few hundred thousand dollars worth of clothing to around three and customers, and its spent over in six months, spent a hundred and eighty eight million dollars. So you know that that's like the classic story of the dot com crash, right, a company that just balloons beyond its its capacity to deliver upon the promises, and then burns through way too much money buying things that are not core to the business.

And then as a result, once everyone says, hey, well we'll wait a minute, maybe we're getting maybe we're overreacting, maybe we're overvaluing these companies, it crashed hard. Another one that I was very sad to see go was web Van. Yes, now, for a while, uh there were a couple of competing UH stores, at least here in Atlanta, I know there were there were others in other parts of the country. Web Van, I believe was at least semi national here. Yeah,

it was in several cities across the country. It was not it wasn't nationwide or anything, but there were there were like eight or nine at ease, and it was a good spread across the country. Yeah. And the idea was you would order your groceries online on the website and someone would deliver them to your house within a thirty minute window. You would tell them like, you would tell them approximately what time you would be home, and

within thirty minutes of that time you should receive the delivery. So, actually, I don't know anybody who tried web van, or I would just let me finish, go ahead, or I believe the other in here in Atlanta was a home grocer, might have been. I don't know. I was a webvan customer. I don't know anybody here in Atlanta who tried those services and didn't love them. Oh my god, I loved them, um, And I think virtually everything else I've read online about

them was not positive, extremely positive. The problem was that they were suffering from poor adoption. People didn't I don't know that they didn't necessarily know what these companies were, but they they in a way, it's kind of a throwback to old style services, like you know, the milkman delivering these things to your house. Maybe they considered it antiquated, but for whatever reason, UM, none of them really took off. The Florida Grocer Publics was also considering a move into

that and and abandoned that. Um. There are some places where there are services like that. I have slowly crept back in Peapod for a while was sort of making a niche. And and you may you may have heard of things in your in your area Community supported Agriculture c s a S. Yes, these are are farms that sell a certain a certain amount of produce that's produced. Usually there's some sort of collective involved, and you might pay a weekly fee and you get a delivery of

produce sent to you. So that's kind of similar, but it's on a much more regional, like a very local base,

as opposed to national. One of the things Web did, besides the fact of a poor adoption that that led to its downfall, was it spent a lot of money to It spent over a billion dollars on warehouses, and it's spent it spent faster than it could bring in money, and so once confidence began to waiver in the tech market overall, there was no way it could cover its costs, and thus it went bankrupt and around two thousand one, and actually several companies did go bankrupt around that time,

the two thousand two two period, because that's what was happening. Uh As you know, the people started to realize very quickly in two thousand that the companies they had been investing in they had overvalued. There was there was no way that any company could deliver on that that potential at that stage in its life, and as a result, people began to abandon in droves, and there were other reasons that contributed to people getting out of the market.

Interest rates were going up. It's actually a really complex story, and there have been books written about this, but in general, what happened was people abandoned ship and as a result these companies their value plummeted. So the company that had been worth millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, it's now effectively worthless. They don't have the money to pay their overhead, they can't pay their employees. They had to start laying

people off. All those stock options that were initially worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars were now you know, you hear stories about people just like boxes of stock options or stocks that were worthless that you could have turned it into you know, uh, packing paper if you wanted to and um and so if you if you didn't cash in at the right time, you were out

of luck. And as a result, also the job market became glutted with tech people, especially like web administrators, I T. Professionals. You suddenly had an influx of all these tech folks and not enough jobs because the companies that had been supporting them didn't exist anymore. Yeah, and this is you know it. It eventually settled out, but not before a lot of tech people lost their jobs and a lot of theoretical money on stock options, and a lot of real investors lost a lot of real money on their

investments too. And of course it's made people very wary, which is why these days when people like group on are talking about the possibility of an I p O, people like Facebook, Twitter, Twitter. Twitter is a really good example. Actually, yeah, Twitter is is particularly uh nerve wracking because if you think about the definition of the bubble um, they're people are excited about it. But Twitter has been sort of reluctant to give us a business plan that that's publicly

available so that we can see it. So uh, you know, a stock might go up. And if the company can't say, oh, yes we raise this much money through for example, advertising, you know it it that's what has people talking about it again. But I think people in general are more aware than they were in that and they also have an idea. People are more tech savvy as a whole than they were back then when everything seemed like, oh, that's a really neat idea. Yes, it's a neat idea,

but you can't put it off. Yeah, you still see stories. I mean there are especially a couple of years ago, before we had the economic downturn again, uh, you heard stories about venture capitalists sinking more money into various uh ventures.

Then you might think is wise. But in a lot of cases those panned out not because the companies were successful, but because some other larger company came along and acquired it for quite a bit of money, and then the investment pays off that way, which I mean, that's another like you're making a long shot bet. So you might think, oh, this little company here that's just starting up needs venture capital.

I don't see it as being particularly successful in any way that's going to generate a lot of money, But I bet Google is going to buy it. Then you would go and you would invest in the small company with the hope that Google would come along and munch it up, and you know, the way things are, you'd probably have a seven percent chance of being right. And that that that's not to say that Google would do anything with it that would be successful. It just that

seems to be the way it works. Now. I love Google, and they have done some wonderful things, but some of their purchases have not really worked out Jaiku. Yeah, I knew you were going to pick them, so so we'll have to We'll have to see where, because I think the market is going to be a little bit more cautious and if there is a bubble, it won't inflates so spectacularly as the last one did. Yeah, probably simply because it's so close in proximity to the previous one.

But um, that doesn't mean that people shouldn't try to get some investment and move out there. You know, I hope to see that that uh, there're more new tech companies willing to make the plunge. You know, we definitely don't want to see innovation suffer, right, but you want me to make it happen. We just gotta be careful because I mean, I can tell you Atlanta suffered, really, it suffered quite a bit after the dot com crash.

I worked for a company that was not directly related to tech, but had a lot of clients that were tech companies, and once that crash happened, the revenue for the company I worked for suffered. So that kind of thing can happen where even if you aren't directly related to it. You feel that impact. And of course I was a web band customer, so when webban went belly up that I didn't have a car at the time.

I lived a mile away from the nearest train station, and then I'd have to take a train and a bus to get to the closest market, and then I'd had to carry all that stuff back. You know. Web Ban was exactly what I needed at the time, now, you know, so I keep hoping for something like that to really start to make its way back, even if

it's locally supported as opposed to being a big national chain. Yeah, I would imagine that that the failure probably still has some people weary, but I think it could succeed given the opportunity. All right, Well, that was a great discussion on the dot com crash. If you guys have input, If you were directly affected or indirectly affected by the dot com crash and you want to share your story,

you certainly can feel free to do so. You can shoot us a message on Facebook or Twitter or handle at both of those is tech stuff h s W. Or you can shoot us an email and that address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For moral on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived.

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