The Guardian is running a story today which marks the fifth anniversary of the NASDAQ hitting its all-time high of 5048.62, the pinnacle of the dot-com era before its steady march to the bottom, hitting 1114.11 by October of 2002, a loss of 78% of its peak value.
March 11, 2000 was a heady time indeed; I was a participant in the dot-com boom like so many of us, serving as the technical lead at a burgeoning sports lifestyle company Active.com, which was buying out its competition left and right like some huge Borg cube. Lots of caffeine, little sleep, and a frantic energy stemming from the belief that the “new economy” was an unstoppable wave that you could either ride to riches or would bury you in obsolesence. Well I guess it turns out that it was a wave, but not quite as unstoppable as we had hoped – I guess actually making money is still a fairly important business objective that can’t be ignored for too long, eh?
Well it didn’t exactly turn out as planned, but an invaluable experience nonetheless. And I got to work with some excellent people as well, that I still keep in regular touch with today. How did those times treat you?
I was nicely sheltered in undergraduate education, it looked like there was no stopping the dotcom companies… I elected to go off to Russia, instead, and teach English. Meanwhile everything went to hell in a handbasket back here…