#dot-com-bubble

#dot-com-bubble

In 2000, Flash websites proliferate, blogging expands, social news sites like Slashdot gain influence - all of this while the dot-com bubble slowly deflates and Napster dominates headlines. After the hype and fear of Y2K (a.k.a. the Millenium bug) quickly faded in January 2000, the internet continued its mostly joyful rise in the culture. Sure, the dot-com bubble got pricked in March and then slowly deflated, but the web itself didn't stop growing.

Chambers took a similarly meteoric ride in his early days running Cisco, which had a market value of about $15 billion in 1995, when networking equipment suddenly became must-have components for the buildup of the internet. The feverish demand briefly turned the firm into the world's most valuable company - worth $550 billion in March 2000 - before the investment bubble burst. The crash caused Cisco's stock price to plunge more than 80% during a period that Chambers still recalls as the worst of his career.

"We're drowning in toxic assets, startups with no revenue, fake demos, AI tools built just to sell AI tools to other people building AI tools."