Ask HN: Was there really a dot com bubble?

2 points by itry 11 years ago | 5 comments

Wikipedia points out, that at the peak of the dot com bubble, "America's 371 publicly traded Internet companies have grown to the point that they are collectively valued at $1.3 trillion".

Thats about as much as the combined value of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook today. So the internet did hold up to its promise.

Even if we only look at companies that already existed during the "bubble" - 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?

tptacek 11 years ago |

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.

mohammadmansur 11 years ago |

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?

zwiteof 11 years ago |

> 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?

kohanz 11 years ago |

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

brudgers 11 years ago |

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.