We need to find founders who built businesses during the 2001 crash and learn everything from them! 

Is Ben Horowitz on FC? Lol

Chasing Curiosity. Empathetic Accelerationist. Founding Fullstack Engineer @icebreaker. YC S16, KB7. 
icbk.me/tayyab.fc

No but @pmarca is!

Would love to hear about the times back then?

If not can someone recommend a dotcom bubble book?

ai x hardware skunk-works with @waitin4agi_ (twitter); 

prev: cofounded a hw x iot company @noctolabs;

IC in BTC, ETH and SOL ecosystem (systems)

building https://getlumina.com/ learning AI and writing random stuff.  long time lurker first time writer

(1) Important pattern #1: The 2000 crash was like dominos falling down from sector to sector within tech. Each sector in turn got whacked by the collapse of the one behind it until they were all wrecked, at least temporarily. None were spared.

(2) Important pattern #2: If you look at the NASDAQ chart from 2000 to 2003, you'll see there were ~5 "false dawns" where it looked like recovery was happening, until another stage of the collapse hit.

(3) Important pattern #3: ~Every tech CEO knew he should do a single deep layoff to prevent ongoing morale damage from subsequent layoffs. He then did an initial ~10% cut, and then ~6 more 10% cuts by the time the carnage was over.

(4) Important pattern #4: The bottom did not come in until the demoralization was so comprehensive that the tech crash wasn't even generating news headlines anymore, it was just sad and depressing. Also, until the hotshot public stock managers of the era were fired or retired.

(5) Important pattern #5: During the recovery, every single actual good thing that happened was painted as "TECH BUBBLE 2.0" by a histrionic press and commentator class. This continued for a full decade.

(B) A significant number of really important new tech companies grew during the crash, including Google, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce, and VMWare.

(C) The 2000-2003 tech crash was the junior varsity partner of the 2000-2003 telecom crash, which was much bigger and, significantly, involved both equity and debt. Far more money was lost in telecom than tech. In retrospect, I think this colored people's view of how bad the tech crash actually was.

(D) In the spirit of "experts have predicted 9 of the last 2 recessions", there were many other temporary hits to tech stocks both before and after the big 2000 crash. It is not at all obvious which hits are temporary or significant until you see how they play out.

Generally, ~everyone acquitted themselves poorly. VCs overinvested in the boom, underinvested in the bust. Public investors bought high, sold low. CEOs bled their companies out over time instead of taking their medicine up front. The press was overly positive before, and then went psychotic after and never recovered.

But, day does follow night, capitalism works, the market recovered, and 2004-2021 was a far bigger boom than 1994-2000 and deservedly so.

(A) The most important difference between then and now is that the market sizes for tech then were SO much smaller than today. ~50 million people on mainly wired narrowband Internet then, versus ~5 billion people on mainly wireless broadband Internet now.