What I can tell you with some confidence is that something like the dot com bust can never happen again in our industry.
The strange thing was how suddenly it happened. It felt like the majority of projects got defunded in a matter of weeks or months. Our funding disappeared as the VC firm collapsed together with its parent company. Our customers (telcos) stopped approving any new projects that weren't guaranteed to be profitable within the quarter as they were hit by a ruinous bidding war for frequency sprectrum at the same time.
The reason why I'm saying it can never happen again (in this particular industry) is that tech/internet was a tiny and isolated part of the economy back then (called "The New Economy"). Today's tech industry is huge and very diverse. It's part of everything now. The largest corporations on earth are now tech firms. Back then, there was nowhere to go for many employees in that sector (at least for a while).
I was fortunate enough to have saved a bit of money, partly because I had refused to take stock options in place of proper payment. So I was able to self-fund some projects that I was interested in with a goal of creating an organically growing company. I've been avoiding the whole high growth VC culture ever since, which may have been a mistake in purely financial terms.
The strange thing was how suddenly it happened. It felt like the majority of projects got defunded in a matter of weeks or months. Our funding disappeared as the VC firm collapsed together with its parent company. Our customers (telcos) stopped approving any new projects that weren't guaranteed to be profitable within the quarter as they were hit by a ruinous bidding war for frequency sprectrum at the same time.
The reason why I'm saying it can never happen again (in this particular industry) is that tech/internet was a tiny and isolated part of the economy back then (called "The New Economy"). Today's tech industry is huge and very diverse. It's part of everything now. The largest corporations on earth are now tech firms. Back then, there was nowhere to go for many employees in that sector (at least for a while).
I was fortunate enough to have saved a bit of money, partly because I had refused to take stock options in place of proper payment. So I was able to self-fund some projects that I was interested in with a goal of creating an organically growing company. I've been avoiding the whole high growth VC culture ever since, which may have been a mistake in purely financial terms.